Up to a point one has to follow (but not necessarily to trust) the Zeitgeist. Ever since Ehrenberg’s seminal article When did the Polis Rise?’,1 various forms of the question have continually preoccupied Greek historians, and the question received a fresh impetus with two books in 1976 and with Moses Finley’s 1977 article on ‘The Ancient City from Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond’.2 The tempo has perceptibly quickened since then, both thematically, and via monographic histories of single cities, and via the resources and discussions which are currently going into the Copenhagen polis project. Such activity has been neither frivolous, nor fashion-led, nor repetitive: it seems to reflect, in very varied ways, a perception that Ehrenberg’s question is still a real one and still needs an answer.
Only up to a point, for the terms of the discourse have changed, in at least three ways. First, Gawantka has reminded us uncomfortably that ‘polis’ as a scholarly term of art is a late nineteenth-century invention, prefigured indeed by Kuhn in 1845 but taken into general use (with a sub-text of its own) only after Burckhardt’s Griechische Kulturgeschichte of 1898. To use it incautiously, or to assume that its use in Greek sources can always be correlated with a single geopolitical phenomenon, is to elide the potential conceptual differences between ‘polis’, ‘city’, ‘city-state’, and ‘microstate’. Likewise, Roussel and Bourriot between them have made us aware that the use of ‘tribe’ and ‘genos’ as social categories stems essentially from Fustel de Coulanges in 1864 and is vulnerable, not to say self-contradictory, in several ways.3 That is especially so if these terms (and one might add ‘phratry’) are used to denote not the segmental entities which are visible and safely describable from the Classical period and later, but the literally prehistoric entities which have been deemed to be the precursors of the Archaic and Classical polis: even more so if they are used in a primordialist sense4 rather than as labels for comparatively late and reshapable social constructs. In other words, our basic vocabulary of description and analysis has itself become the object of scrutiny and of scepticism, even though it derives directly from authors in the Greek historical—antiquarian tradition who were themselves native speakers, knew their institutions at first hand, and had set themselves the scholarly tasks of creating a working model of the development and articulation of their own polities.
The second change has consisted of an awkward enlargement of chronological focus. Against Berve’s argument that it was only at the turn of the fifth century, when the preponderant overshadowing influence of dynasts and ‘fürstliche Kräfte’ had been eroded, that the polis could come into its own, Ehrenberg in 1937 could with good reason point to epigraphic and literary evidence which showed poleis already mature and active in the seventh and sixth centuries, even if he did not push the evidence from epic as far as Luce and others did a generation later.5 Since Ehrenberg, however, the focus has split. In one direction the decipherment of Linear B fostered the ambition to find in the Late Bronze Age material components of social organization which might have had linear descendants in the Archaic period. Though that initial optimism has faded,6 the Mycenaean dimension with its evidence of a continuity of Greek speech remains, prompting the inference that post- Mycenaean processes of state-formation cannot have been a wholly virgin or independent growth. In contrast, the 1960s and early 1970s saw crystallize a picture of the early Greek Iron Age as a period of drastic depopulation, systems collapse, utter poverty, and break-up of the Mycenaean koine into a set of isolated regional cells in only spasmodic contact with each other.7 Granted, the starkness of that picture is now being tempered. Continuity of settlement and culture is acknowledged for some landscapes (e.g. Attika) and is being cautiously reinstated for others (e.g. Delphi, Miletos), continuity of cult is being seen here and there, and pockets of wealth and social stratification are being identified. All the same, the detailed exploration of other regional landscapes such as Elis or Phokis,8 if anything, confirms the picture of near-abandonment and Iron Age resettlement. Regional trajectories of repopulation and development in the Dark Age and after clearly differed so sharply from each other in nature, scale and date that no one model for the ‘rise of the polis’ can possibly be valid.
A third change stems from the transformation in ‘archaeology’. Up until perhaps twenty years ago the presentational frameworks of the main synoptic works on the archaeology of the post-Mycenaean, Dark Age and Archaic periods of Greece largely reflected genres of material, principally of course ceramics but also metal objects, etc, as well as the sites themselves.9 Such analyses coexisted with, but did not conceptually alter, the portraits of those periods which historians and antiquarians were attempting to construct on the basis of written evidence, literary or other.10 Such a separation is no longer viable. Perhaps for no other area or period of classical antiquity, save possibly Roman Britain, has the gradual bridging of what has been called the ‘great divide’ between archaeology and classical archaeology so rapidly yielded a new interpretative historical framework. Modes of burial above all, but also changes in settlement size and distribution, or systems of artefact creation ond distribution, are being confidently used as evidence for the unfolding of social pressures. Already in 1980 Snodgrass could weave descriptions of genres of evidence into a picture of a structural revolution.11 Ian Morris could give his 1987 book Burial and Ancient Society the sub-title The Rise of the Greek City-State, and could argue in 1992 ‘that [forms of burial display] offer a framework around which to organize a history of social structure’.12 James Whitley in 1991 could devote six pages to ‘State Formation and the Rise of the Polis’ as a major part of a chapter on ‘Theoretical Perspectives’.13 In such a context it is not only older work, such as that collected in Gschnitzer’s Zur griechischen Staatskunde of 1969, which looks old-fashioned, but also more recent survey articles such as Peèírka’s or books such as Tausend’s which use textual evidence for the Amphiktyonies far more than evidence for the aménagement of sanctuaries.14 However, diagnosis is easy, treatment another matter: as Renfrew has put it, ‘In reality the most difficult task is often that of bringing into meaningful relationship the data from the different categories of evidence.’15
Other changes in the discourse beyond these three could no doubt be identified. However, my task here is not so much to compile a comprehensive Forschungsbericht as to pose helpful questions. The question ‘Where should we be looking?’ of my title is one; the question ‘What would now count as a satisfactory replacement of Busolt and Swoboda’s Griechische Staatskunde?’ is another; the question When should we be looking?’ is a third, all the more pointed against Parker’s recent reminder that ‘any attempt to treat the “birth of the polis” as a datable occurrence is in danger of compacting a long history into too short a space’.16 What follows here, therefore, is merely a list of suggested guideposts, offered as a help to debate and maybe as stimuli for whichever chalkenteric scholar eventually constructs a new Staatskunde—on, one hopes, generative rather than antiquarian principles. The immediate task is one of disaggregation: that is to say, of separating out the various strands of social process and of interpretative assumptions before trying to put them together again in a new way.
A first move has to be a gentle disengagement from Aristotle, for the influence, conscious or unconscious, of his model of the emergence of the polis out of household and village (Pol. 1.1252b) has been great but unhelpful. In spite of the supporting material, especially in Book 3, that model is not the historically based generalization which it purports to be so much as Aristotle’s riposte at the level of theory to the sophistic argument that social order is artificial, not natural; and by assuming that the only entity deserving consideration as the natural telos of development is the small-scale republican polis, it sets up unhelpful boundaries between poleis and other forms of polity, while any comprehensive theory of state formation appropriate for the Mediterranean Iron Age must keep the latter equally in view.
A similar distance has to be maintained from the antiquarian tradition, learned and intelligent though many of its scholars were. No-one who has worked his or her way through the doxographies provided by Bourriot can retain illusions about the influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship exerted by the rationalized reconstructions of Athenian prehistory created by, or reflected in, the Ath. Pol. tradition.17 Indeed, in one sense we may be fortunate not to have Dikaiarchos’ Bios Hellados preserved to us, for its fragments (frs 47–66 Wehrli2) suggest it included a complex model of the transformations of social development from whose influence it would have been hard to escape. It is not that any study of the development of the polis can do without theory: rather, that preconceptions and choices have to be explicit.
For two reasons the use of the word ‘polis’ must carry a health warning. The first is that, as various recent studies have made clear,18 its usage represents a compound of different chronological layers denoting a variety of settlements and polities. From epic use, to denote mostly a fortified nucleated settlement seen from outside but sometimes also an unfortified nucleated settlement, it extends through the ‘classic’ Aristotelian denotation to encompass, in a remarkable Aeschylean image, the whole Persian Empire,19 while still in certain contexts remaining interchangeable with kome20 or remaining embedded in old district names such as the Marathonian Tetrapolis. Second, even if such extended uses are pressed to the limit, they do not cover the whole spectrum of the polities which emerged from the Greek Dark Ages. To focus only on those meeting Aristotelian definitions, to sideline ethne, monarchies, or areas prevented by external repression from developing their own polities (e.g. S.W.Arkadia till after Leuktra), is to succumb to the metropolitan snobbery of Athens-based writers and to skew the study of Staatskunde unacceptably. Indeed, as work for the Leeds and Manchester seminar series ‘Alternatives to the Democratic Polis’ has brought out, the subsequent (and better-documented) development of the ‘non-polis’ regions of Greece offers so many helpful models for the study of earlier processes that one ignores them at one’s peril.21 A term such as ‘microstate’ (German Kleinstaat) begs no questions, includes all Greek polities, and is greatly preferable.
While Roussel’s assault on the inherited notion of ‘tribe’ cleared much ground, it left untouched—and more prominent—the problem of how to read the ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ names of both the supposedly Greek (Dorians, Ionians, Aiolians) and the supposedly non-Greek (Dryopes, Leleges, etc.) populations of Archaic Greece. Herodotos, our best witness, took them as real bounded components of his past and his present. So did all other Greek writers, even if Thucydides, perhaps taking his cue from Antiochos, is exceptional in seeing much of the fifth-century history of the Greek West in terms of Dorian—Ionian tensions. Yet the problem of what they mean has to be faced, at two levels: first, at that of understanding what those involved meant by such identifiers, whether subjectively or as observers, and second, at the level of reconciling such labels with the modern debate about ethnicity. I cite only one non-classical example, John Peel’s study of the ‘mega-tribal’ grouping of the Yoruba in Nigeria. It is, he points out,
a modern category entirely, in that the vast bulk of peoples who now know themselves as Yoruba did not do so in 1900.
Originally the word referred to only one Yoruba grouping, the Oyo. Yoruba ethnic identity began to be adopted by other groups (e.g. Ijesha, Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ondo) from the 1920s, as migration, cash-cropping, education and conversion to the world religions drew more people into a Nigeria-wide sphere of social relations. From the late 1930s, when nationalism really began to get underway, the Yoruba began to shape themselves politically against other ‘tribes’, especially the Igbo in the political crucible of Lagos.22
The analogy with post-Mycenaean Greece is suggestive, all the more in the light of Peel’s further argument against Cohen that ethnicity has to be seen historically, is both a political and a cultural phenomenon, and is ‘a process or a project, not a structure’. In a closely similar vein Jonathan Hall’s recent study of ethnicity in early Iron Age Greece23 uses literary, linguistic and archaeological evidence to trace the emergence of ethnic groups as ‘social constructions’. Such arguments should give the historian of the early polis pause, for the ethnic identifiers used by Herodotos and others for Archaic Greece, so far from reinforcing polis identities and ideologies, cross-cut them in various complex ways: what, for example, did it mean for Eetion to be ‘by origin Lapithes and Kaineides’ (Her. 5.92.ß.l), for Herodotos, for his fifth-century audience, for those who transmitted the story to Herodotos, for the Kypselidai, for the Bacchiadai, or for Eetion himself? We are going to need an approach which recognizes how real such identifiers were felt to be without hypostatizing them as confidently as some recent work24 has done: I have as yet no sense for the long-term solution.
The separation of these processes in an Archaic Greek context is probably the most difficult, and yet the most essential, of all the disjunctions that need to be made. They overlap in every possible way: yet not all states were, or became, poleis (e.g. Thessaly), not all towns became the centres of poleis (e.g. Acharnai, Gonnos), not all poleis were towns,25 and so on.
No part of this ensemble can be isolated without the explicit use of theory. Clearest, though still resoundingly controversial, are the notions of ‘town’ and urbanization, where the post-Weber debate over the pre-industrial city26has left intact the idea that all or most of a set of observable criteria need to be met for a settlement to be termed ‘town’, even if Weber’s basic conception of the ancient city as ‘consumer’ has come to be seen as less than satisfactory.27 An explicitly Weberian list of such criteria includes:
Though the list could be extended,29 it is a sensible enough approach, buttressed by studies on the ground of the gradual consolidation of selected towns: Corinth is the classic Archaic example, with Athens, Argos, and Samos.30 Yet, and crucially, such a topographical—functional specification need say nothing about power distribution, sense of community or degree of independence: a town need not be a state or a polis.31
In contrast, the problem of state formation is addressed by an entirely different body of theory, mostly dating from the 1970s though profitably called in aid in a recent book on Athenian citizenship.32 Criteria here revolve around the shift from patterns of personal leadership exercised by chiefs, ‘big men’, etc., towards stabler and more impersonal structures. Land seizure by an invading force is one scenario, since retention and exploitation of the land require an on-going control structure and collaboration among the invaders (Thessaly certainly, Sparta possibly). The creation of a succession system for a monarchy could be another, as the brutal version practised by the Argeads of Macedon exemplifies.
Different again are the ideas intrinsic to polis formation: that executive power should rotate; that the use of executive power should conform to ‘law’ in some sense, whatever the mode of validation for that ‘law’ might be; that land-plus-population should be a ‘common thing’, not a private estate; that part at least of the population should count as the shareholders of that ‘common thing’; that no external person should control that ‘common thing’; and so on.33 Early polis formation has therefore to be seen as a special subset of state formation, occurring in certain areas of Greece. Only thus can we start to identify the pressures and the needs which forced certain states and certain landscapes to evolve such new and peculiar institutions, even against the inertia characteristic of all socio-political systems. This is not the place to review at length the motors of change which are currently or ought to be called in aid. The hardy perennial among them has been the demographic one, combining the pressures and tensions which led to colonization with the creation of the ‘colony’ format itself and the feedback of that experience into the colonizing states: others are alluded to below. The debate will plainly continue. It can best proceed if the analysis of polis formation is separated from those of town formation and state formation, even though the three processes are unfolding simultaneously.
This chapter was written concurrently with one which surveyed the tribes, phratries and gene of Archaic Greece.34 The focuses required for it brought home to me the determinative role which the process of fashioning and adapting segmental structures played in creating the Greek microstates. One must not be misled by the endless variety of names used for the various segments, or give way to the temptation to define differences too precisely, for what matters is the basic notion of creating or formalizing a set of segments, of roughly comparable size and standing, which can fulfil a range of functions and can thereby articulate a population in ways independent of fluid, short-term, or personality-dependent agglomerations such as households or chiefs’ followings.
One major help towards understanding this process was Roussel’s argument that, contrary to long-held assumptions, the ‘Ionic’ or ‘Dorian’ tribes of many Greek polities were not survivals of a real ‘tribal’ society but shallow-rooted social constructs of the Archaic period. Not everyone has been happy with this35or with Bourriot’s simultaneous demolition of the primordial status of gene, while phratries and their congeners (ktoinai, syssitia, etc.) have yet to be tackled genetically in the new climate,36 but overall the two books of 1976 represent a liberation, allowing us to see the creation of political structures in Archaic Greece in a far more realistic light. In fact, the question whether entities such as Hylleis or Boreis or Labyadai or Aithalees were ‘really’ ancient or recent, ‘territorial’ or descent-defined, is immaterial: what matter were the decisions to align them into sets and the purposes for which they were needed. Thus, for example, Tyrtaios fr. 19.8 West shows the three Dorian tribes being used by seventh-century Sparta as brigading units for the army. Antiquarian information and survivals show the four Ionic tribes being used in Attika as regiments, revenue-managing units, constituencies for the selection of some officials, and as units active in cult and in at least some aspects of law. Phratries and their sub-groups in Attika and Delphi came to function as the groups which evaluated legitimacy, sponsored the principal rites de passage, and thereby in effect regulated inheritance and community membership. Similarly, in central and northern Greece, where polis retained its older use, we can trace the creation of a political order via the formalization of segmental ‘parts’, typically termed moirai (Thessaly) or mere (Boiotia, Malis, Aitolia), which were functionally comparable, it seems from the skimpy evidence, to the Dorian or Ionic ‘tribes’ or their replacements. The creation of such ‘parts’ or segments, themselves the products of necessity as public need and social interaction in war, ritual, law or administration became more complex, transformed a laos into a civic society, and turned a chief’s hetairoi into magistrates.37 If we want to trace the modalities by which the Greek microstates emerged (as distinct from identifying the prime movers), this above all is where we should be looking.
Some years ago I contributed a chapter on ‘Religion and the State [in Late Archaic Greece]’ to the new C.A.H.,38 written in a period when Greek religion was a minority passion. Since then, for various reasons (gender studies; assimilation of structural anthropology; the emergence of cultural history) interest in it has burgeoned. The focus has shifted, from antiquarian concern with rituals and beliefs to the exploration of social functions and semiotic systems, while the perception that the formation of such systems was an intrinsic and major component of the process of microstate formation has both stimulated books of importanc39 and laid the foundations for a new, far more religion-orientated generation of scholarship. The challenge now is rather to decide what, if anything, will count as a satisfactory narrative-cum-analysis of the roles of cult, ritual and belief in the Staatskunde of the Archaic period, given that religion does not intrinsically order itself in microstate format. To take one set of examples: while household religion has to be pieced together from scattered literary sources, the calendars of sacrifices from Attika and elsewhere make clear how much investment (of time and resource) and attention went into observances at the level of village or district or phratry. Festivals and processions which focused on ‘central places’ such as the Athenian Akropolis or the Larisa at Argos will have had a wider radius of attraction, but will have been dwarfed by the sanctuaries and festivals which attracted regional or even wider interest or became the focus of amphiktionic activity. To identify the pros and cons of investments, not just in dedications, but in the creation of command structures for building, maintenance and ceremony at each level, should help to clarify why polities crystallized at some magnitudes of area and population but not at others.
A second example: it is now common coin to see the ninth-century shift from the disposal of selected surplus resource underground, as grave goods, to its display above ground as dedications, together with the essential corollary in the form first of sanctuary and then of temple from c. 800, as seminal steps in the formation of what we know as Greek religion. Yet parallel ways of using surplus resources, e.g. for eranos feasts within phratries or Dorian syssitia, or as distributions to community members, tend to be seen under different headings. To re-amalgamate the analysis of such forms of behaviour should therefore be also to ask who is making the decisions, and within which frameworks of subordination, and thereby to rejoin the discourse on structures which is basic to microstate formation.
Ehrenberg pointed out in 1937 that texts from Archaic Greece reflect a difficulty in finding a single word for ‘citizen’. The downdating of some of the documents he quotes robs them of some significance,40 but the tripartite classification telestas/etas/ damos in the Elis—Heraia treaty still has interest in view of the continued use of etas for ‘(private) citizen’ in fifth-century verse and public language.41 However, his point could be usefully refocused on the dates by which, and the ways by which, the word polites or polietes moves out from its Homeric use in the locational sense ‘inhabitants of the polis’42 to encompass the classical meaning ‘citizen’. (It has clearly done so by the time of the Lesbian poets or Theognis, though the latter’s oscillation between polites and astos would bear further thought.) The move is obviously integral to the process of polis formation sketched above, requiring especially the crystallization of the idea of the state as a ‘thing’,43 in the benefits and responsibilities of which inhabitants participate as members, equally or unequally, like shareholders in an unlimited company. The Greek terms used, especially koinonia, politeia and metechein tes politeias, make the ideas clear, but the pressures which led to their emergence are less so. One leading idea for the last thirty years has been that tenser border conflicts over land, and the advantage which a massed ‘hoplite’ infantry army conferred in such conflicts, put those enrolled in such armies in a position by the mid-seventh century to press for greater power in a wider ‘franchise’, if need be by force. However, the evidence that such massed armies were no novelty to Homer has sown doubts about the reality of the ‘hoplite reform’,44 and we should probably be looking much more broadly. Two topics are salient: first, the emergence or formalization of that notion of a man’s combined rights and duties vis-à-vis the community for which Greek came to use the word telos, and second, the degree to which, in each community at various times, there came to be a convergence, complete or partial, between the circles of (1) those who could/should fight, (2) those who had direct access to community rather than household justice, (3) those who could own, buy, or inherit land, (4) those who could vote and speak in an assembly, and (5) those who could hold public office or priesthoods. A detailed logos constructed on such lines would get us a long way towards understanding the unique quality of Greek citizenship.
It will be news to nobody that the culture of Archaic Greece was enriched and transformed by influences coming from the eastern Mediterranean. The alphabet itself, substantial components of myth, architectural and sculptural forms, elements of vocabulary, forms of metalwork and ivory-work, styles and motifs in representational art, certain cults and deities, and even such customs as that of reclining on couches, are all widely and rightly seen as having been transmitted to Greece via the migration of persons and via the transport of objects, above all in the ‘orientalizing century’ from c. 750 to c. 650.45 Nor is it in the least radical these days to warn both that the processes of transfer are far less those of simple imitation than those of creative and selective addition or adaptation of new ideas to an existing indigenous tradition, and that such transfers must be seen not as the inevitable outspread of a dominant culture but as the collective product of a series of choices made by the ‘recipient’ culture (especially by its dominant elite) at particular periods for particular purposes within particular structures mentales. What is radical, but ought not to be, is to ask whether the process of selective adaptations included political forms and ideas. Whether influenced adversely by the wilder claims for Phoenicians made long ago by V.Bérard,46 or discouraged by the lack of Near Eastern evidence, or simply perpetuating the calamitous cleft between Graeco-Roman studies and Ancient Near Eastern and Semitic studies, scholarly discussion has barely explored the idea.47 Yet the known borrowings and influences were being filtered, via patronage choices and prestige mechanisms, by precisely the same elite as was simultaneously constructing the new forms of polity which are our concern. To disjoin the two processes is counter-intuitive. Indeed, two components of the new polities have direct correlates in the relevant areas of the Eastern Mediterranean. First, whatever reality we do or do not, post-Drews, accord to pre-700 kingship in Greece, forms of monarchy closely comparable to those well attested in the Phoenician cities48 were palpably widespread in Archaic Greece, from Cyprus and Sparta through the tagia of Thessaly to the various ‘tyrant’ regimes of Ionia, the Aegean, and central Greece. Second, though the evidence for councils of elders in Byblos, Tyre and Sidon is thin and scattered, it suggests institutions not far removed from Gerousia or Areiopagos.49 This is not to suggest precise knowledgeable borrowings on the part of Greeks so much as the sort of awareness of institutions in Assyria or Phoenicia or Egypt which mercenaries, craftsmen, and emporoi will inevitably have gained and brought back. Nor is it to suggest that models for the third, defining ingredient of the polis polity—the assembly of citizens— is an import thence, for congeners in the Eastern Mediterranean are almost impossible to detect.
Greece is not the only European peninsular landmass to be lapped or surrounded by Mediterranean waters: Italy and Iberia need notice. It cannot be pure chance that the formative period of the Greek polis system also saw develop in Latium and Etruria systems which are at least superficially comparable.50 Yet, though their contacts with Old and colonial Greece were continuous from an early date, and though their respective Leagues as described in Graeco-Roman sources bear a distinct resemblance to Greek amphiktyonies, it would need virtuoso argument to prove more than parallel development—but even that requires some explanation. For Iberia, though apart from the south-eastern coastal fringe of Phoenician and Greek colonies there can as yet be no talk of city-state systems, none the less the spectacular growth in data, knowledge, and understanding of the social processes at work in pre-Roman Iberia, documented in a recent book,51 is for the first time allowing us to pose comparative questions about trajectories of urbanization and political development across all three Mediterranean peninsulas. Indeed, the spectrum of comparison could be widened still further if (say) the development of the Fürstensitze of Hallstatt Europe52 were brought into the discourse, not to mention the endless debate about hill-forts and oppida 53 or the question (to be posed now in post-Roussel terms) of what one means in a Hallstatt or La Tène context by ‘tribe’. I cannot claim more than the most superficial knowledge of such material, but even that level is enough to prompt the question: are the processes of urbanization, social coagulation and state formation in Iron Age Europe comparable enough for us to need to develop a common analytical vocabulary which could be applied as confidently and appropriately to Archaic Greece as to Iberia or the Upper Rhine or Wessex? I have no idea what the answer is, but the question needs to be asked.54
Some fifteen years ago two US scholars brought out a book which surveyed five city-state systems.55 Chapters on Sumerian city-states, on the Greek polis, on the Italian city-state, on the Swiss and German city-states, and on the Hausa city-states from 1450 to 1804 were rounded off by a comparative chapter written by the two editors. It was a valuable compilation, both for its terse presentation of much heterogeneous information and for the questions of method and approach which it explicitly or implicitly asked, though since the comparisons were between up-and-running systems rather than with their genesis and emergence its direct value to our present concern is limited. Indirectly, though, their book prompts the question whether it would help or hinder the historian of Archaic Greece to think in much broader and comparativist terms. General instinct may well murmur ‘hinder’, on the grounds that it is a risky enough job making comparisons even between the institutions and the terminologies of the Greek states themselves, let alone more wide-rangingly, and that both the boundary conditions and the initial impetuses leading to the crystallization of a microstate system are always purely context-specific.
Yet in at least two ways cross-cultural comparisons may help. In the first place they draw attention to the use of the word ‘system’, which itself is a way of flagging two widespread characteristics of the microstate phenomenon. First, they tend to crystallize in sets:56 not universally so, for the ‘interstitial’57 microstate such as Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Isle of Man, or Hellenistic Rhodes, owing its continued existence to the unstated convenience, mutual hostility or mutual neutralizations of influence on the part of larger neighbours, is a recurrent phenomenon in itself. Yet they are mostly so, as is observable both in the cultures surveyed by Griffeth and Thomas and elsewhere. Second, the interactions at all levels—formal or informal, friendly or hostile, collective or individual—were intense and continuous: Spartan xenelasia was exceptional and notorious. Such interactions encouraged a high degree of cultural and institutional uniformity among the units in the set,58 and cause one to ask why a common culture could not or did not coalesce at a very early stage into a common polity: an absence of leadership, the absence of a common enemy, or the intrusion of cross-cutting values such as participatory citizenship?
The second use of cross-cultural comparisons is to create a checklist of questions, the answers to which serve to locate individual systems and their component units within a broader spectrum and to reveal which aspects of the behaviour of the units in the system are normal and which are odd. For example, a question about the locations of temples and sanctuaries must be a constant. De Polignac’s by now classic analysis of some temples, such as the Argive Heraion, as territorial stakeouts,when complemented by the imposition of others over Mycenaean sites (e.g. the akropoleis of Athens or Tiryns) as symbolic repossession, or by the plethora of rural, cave, and mountain-top sanctuaries, gives a context- and culture-specific answer which is the more valuable for allowing direct comparison, while the importance of the sudden popularity of hero cult sites needs no emphasizing these days. Other obvious constants are, e.g., selection and legitimation mechanisms for rulers, office-holders or magistrates, or the degree to which tensions between a town elite and a contado emerged and were either managed by force and repression (Thessaly, Lakonia, Siena) or minimized (late Archaic Athens).
In a valuable recent paper, Dick Whittaker asked the question, ‘Do theories of the ancient city matter?’59 In this tour d’horizon I have tried to argue that they do, though the attempt has involved skating a long way, very rapidly, over very thin ice. Space permits no more detail or qualification: the task, of creating a synoptic view of some recent scholarship and of setting out some possible (though radical) guidelines, requires no less.60
1 JHS 57 (1937), 147–59. German version in Ehrenberg, Polis und Imperium, 83– 97, and in Gschnitzer (ed.) Zur griechischen Staatskunde, 3–25.
2 Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977), 305–27.
3 Gawantka, Die sogenannte Polis; Roussel, Tribu et cité; Bourriot, Recherches sur la nature du génos.
4 I take this use of the word from J.M.Hall, in Spencer (ed.) Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology, 6–17 at 7.
5 J.V.Luce, PRIA 78C (1978), 1–15; E.Lévy, Ktema 8 (1983, [published 1986]), 55–73; Scully, Homer and the Sacred City; Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 1–10.
6 Compare the caution of J.T.Hooker, in Powell (ed.) The Greek World, 7–26, with the sketch in F.Gschnitzer, Griechische Sozialgeschichte, 10–26.
7 Coldstream, Greek Geometric Pottery; Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece; Desborough, The Greek Dark Ages.
8 Cf. Morgan, Athletes and Oracles, 49 ff. and 235 ff.
9 The format of Archaeologia Homerica is eloquent.
10 Cf. the survey of Athenian tombs by Bourriot, op. cit. (n. 3), 831–1042, now superseded by work such as that of Whitley, Style and Society in Dark Age Greece.
11 Snodgrass, Archaic Greece, chapter 2.
12 Morris, Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity, 128.
13 Op. cit. (n. 10), 39–45.
14 J.Peèírka, Klio 69 (1987), 351–73; Tausend, Amphiktionie und Symmachie.
15 In Spencer, op. cit. (n. 4), xvi. For the general issue cf. also I.Morris, in Morris (ed.) Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies, 8–47; Shanks, Classical Archaeology of Greece.
16 Parker, Athenian Religion, 21.
17 Cf. the comments of de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek CityState, 2–3.
18 Cf. n. 5 above.
19 Cf. Persai 511–12 and especially 715. Sousa is also, less surprisingly, seen as a polis with its polietai (lines 117, 219, 534, 556, 730, 761).
20 For example, Anthela, polis at Her. 7.176.2 but kome at 7.200.2; or the kome in Lokris called Polis (Thuc. 3.101.2).
21 Some fierce words, much à propos, by M.B.Hatzopoulos in Buraselis (ed.) Unity and Units of Antiquity, 161–8.
22 J.D.Y.Peel, in Tonkin, et al (eds) History and Ethnicity, 198–215. Quotations from p. 200.
23 Op. cit. (n. 4), 6–17. Cf. also C.Morgan, PCPhS 37 (1991), 131–63.
24 Notably Tausend, op. cit. (n. 14). More distanced is F.Prinz, Gründungsmythen und Sagenchronologie.
25 For example, Eutaia in Mainalia (Xen. Hell 6.5.12), and cf. Kolb’s dampening comment ‘Die durchschnittliche griechische Polis war siedlungsgeographisch ein Dorf mit einer Dorfmark’ (Die Stadt im Altertum, 76). Conspectuses of the problems in Murray and Price (eds) The Greek City; in Hansen (ed.) The Ancient Greek City-State, and Sources for the Ancient Greek City-State; and in Hansen and Raaflaub (eds) Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis.
26 From Finley, op. cit. (n. 2), one can go backwards through, e.g., Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, Sjoberg, The Pre-Industrial City, and Weber, The City, to F.Tritsch, Klio 22 (1929), 1–83.
27 A recent review by R.Whittaker in Cornell and Lomas (eds) Urban Society in Roman Italy, 9–26, with much further bibliography.
Add P.Wheatley, in Ucko et al. (eds) Man, Settlement and Urbanism, 601–37.
28 Kolb, op. cit. (n. 25), 15.
29 For example, by the more explicit inclusion of functions such as exchange, display, conflict resolution, resource redistribution, decision-making, and rituals and festivals.
30 C.Roebuck, Hesperia 41 (1972), 96–127, and C.K.Williams, II, ASAA 60= 244 (1982 [published 1984]), 9–19 (Corinth); Kolb, op. cit. (n. 25), 77–92.
31 Further examples in H.-P.Drögemiiller, Gymnasium 77 (1970), 484–507.
32 For example, Service, Origins of the State and Civilization; Cohen and Service (eds) Origins of the State; Claessen and Skalnik (eds) The Early State; Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens; I.Morris, in Rich and Wallace-Hadrill (eds) City and Country in the Ancient World, 24–57.
33 Cf. Rhodes, pp. 6–7 above.
34 Forthcoming in Settis (ed.) I Greci, ii.
35 Cf. Th.Schneider, Boreas 14 (1991 [published 1994]), 15–31 (review article of the ‘reception’ of Roussel and Bourriot).
36 Though the debate in the Athenian context has been lively: most recently Lambert, The Phratries of Attica, and Parker, op. cit. (n. 16), 104–8.
37 Cf. the nine aisymnetai appointed to oversee the contests in Phaiakia, who are significantly called demioi (Od. 8.258–9), not to mention the many magistrates called damiourgoi.
38 C.A.H., 2nd edition, iv. 368–88: text completed in late 1979.
39 A proper list would be gargantuan, but basic orientation from, e.g., Burkert, Greek Religion; Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Reading’ Greek Culture; Bremmer, Greek Religion; Parker, op. cit. (n. 16).
40 GDI 1149=SIG3 9=Buck 62=LSAG 220 no. 6 with 408=Meiggs and Lewis 17 (treaty between Elis and Heraia, c. 500); GDI 1153=Buck 63= LSAG 220 no. 8 with 408 (honours for Deukalion, 500–475).
41 Cf. LSJ s.v., II, especially Thuc. 5.79.4.
42 Il. 15.558 and 22.429 (both of Trojans); Od. 7.131 (of Phaiakians). Cf. Scully, op. cit. (n. 5), 54 ff.
43 Cf. especially Walter, An der Polis teilhaben, and also Manville. op. cit. (n. 32). The text above develops ideas sketched in summary form in OCD, 3rd edition, ‘Citizenship, Greek’.
44 For the controversy, A.M.Snodgrass, JHS 85 (1965), 110–22; P.A.Cartledge, JHS 97 (1977), 11–27; J.Salmon, JHS 97 (1977), 84– 101; Latacz, Kampfparänese, Kampfdarstellung und Kampfwirklichkeit; H.Bowden, in Rich and Shipley (eds) War and Society in the Greek World, 45–63; also Raaflaub, pp. 49–51 below.
45 As leads to the topic, Dunbabin, The Greeks and their Eastern Neighbours; Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution; Murray, Early Greece, 2nd edition, chapter 6, with references, pp. 326–8.
46 As Mogens Hansen has suggested to me.
47 Robert Drews is an exception: cf. AJP 100 (1979), 45–58, and Basileus, 81 and 115.
48 For an up-to-date survey, cf. S.F.Bondi, in Krings (ed.) La Civilisation phénicienne et punique, 291 ff. I am grateful to my colleague Professor Alan Millard for guidance on these matters and for bringing this volume to my attention.
49 References in Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians, 49 ff. For earlier periods cf. also W.F.Albright, in CA.H., 3rd edition, ii.2, 520– 1, for councils of elders at Arce and Byblos; Buccellati, Cities and Nations of Ancient Syria; and Bondi, op. cit. (n. 48), 293–5. 1, for councils of elders at Arce 50 Cf. Smith, pp. 208–16 below.
50 Cf. Smith, pp. 208–16 below.
51 Cunliffe and Keay (eds) Social Complexity and the Development of Towns in Iberia.
52 Cf. for example Härke, Settlement Types and Patterns in the West Hallstatt Province.
53 G.Woolf, OJA 12 (1993), 223 ff., with earlier bibliography; J.A.Santos Velasco, Antiquity 68 (1994), 289–99; M.Almagro-Gorbea, in Cunliffe and Keay, op. cit. (n. 51), 175 ff.; various papers in Hill and Comberpatch (eds) Different Iron Ages. More remotely, but valuable for comparison, Bekker-Nielsen, The Geography of Power.
54 For the amusement of twenty-first-century readers, the resonances of our own culture’s debate about a single European currency are not lost on me.
55 Griffeth and Thomas (eds) The City-State in Five Cultures.
56 Sets of twelve, indeed, if one believes the over-tidy traditions for the Panionion, pre-Theseus Attika, Latium, and Etruria.
57 I owe the use of this word to Dr H.A.Forbes.
58 Explorations of various aspects of this in Renfrew and Cherry (eds) Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-Political Change, chapters 1(C.Renfrew) and 3 (A.M. Snodgrass).
59 Whittaker, op. cit. (n. 27).
60 The revision of this chapter has benefited greatly from comments made at Durham and during the companion conference on ‘Archaic Greece: The Evidence’ at Cardiff a few weeks later. My thanks to all (too many to name individually) who contributed in such ways. I also thank the successive student members of my third-year class of the 1980s on ‘The City State’ who first heard, and helped me to hone, some of the ideas presented here. More immediately, my thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for providing the resource of time, to allow me to make a proper job of this paper.