Layout of Greek Citystate Easy to Drawlayout of Greek Citystate
The Origins and Nature of the Greek City-State and its Significance for World Settlement History
John BINTLIFF Durham University
Even today, most ancient historians and classi¬ cal archaeologists, when investigating the origins and nature of the Greek city-state or Polis, are diverted from a clear perspective of the phenome¬ non by the abundant historical and archaeological data available for ancient Athens and Attica. Yet at the same time, the same scholars generally feel it necessary to remind us how abnormal and excep¬ tional the Athenian Classical Polis is -probably from as early as the precocious union of Attica dur¬ ing the late Dark Ages.
Although, therefore, I find my colleague Ian Morris's radical reanalysis of Athenian society dur¬ ing the Dark Ages (Morris 1987) very convincing, I shall be deliberately provocative in arguing that the subtitle of his remarkable book Burial and Society, namely The Rise of the Greek City-State, is mislead¬ ing, since the books focus on Athens deprives the reader of the appropriate viewpoint from which to comprehend the true nature of the typical Greek Polis.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there have been many occasions when it has seemed that English-speaking scholars have been setting the pace in Classical Archaeology when it comes to fun¬ damentally new and stimulating texts (one thinks of studies by Morris, Whitley, Osborne, Alcock). Yet these scholars are in reality operating within a nar¬ row discourse focussing on the pathfinding research publications of their supervisor Anthony Snodgrass; it is a well-known phenomenon in Cambridge intellectual history that such fruitful but introspective schools can find themselves out-of-touch with developments in other scholarly tradi¬ tions. One such, neglected, tradition is that of German historical geography of the ancient world, or "antike Landeskunde" , and it is from this source that I shall draw fundamental inspiration for the following analysis.
Let us begin with my friend Eberhard Ruschen¬ busch, who in a series of penetrating studies (e.g.
Ruschenbusch 1985, 1991) has synthesized what we can say about the typical characteristics of the 700-800 known city-states of the Classical Aegean world. He has shown that: 80 % of poleis studied have maximal territories of 100 km2 and citizen males around 800 in number, whilst 69 % of poleis have only on average 400 adult male citizens -bring¬ ing total city-state populations (excluding slaves and resident aliens) to something of the order of 1600-3200 people. Now a "chora" or territory of 100 km2 maximal is equivalent to a radial territory of 5-6 km -and with this geographical and demographic scale before us we can focus realistically on what Ruschenbusch and others have termed the " Normalpolis" .
The implications of such a small unit of space and population for a typical Polis were already brought out for us much earlier, in the works of another neglected scholar in the German antike Landeskunde tradition -Ernst Kirsten, most deci¬ sively in his major monograph of 1956 Die Griechische Polis (Kirsten 1956) with its significant subtitle als historisch-geographisches Problem des Mittelmeerraumes . The stimulus to Kirstens re¬ searches on the Polis go even further back within the same tradition -to a question innocently raised by his teacher Alfred Philippson of Griechische Landschaften fame: "Why were there so many poleis in Thessaly?"
What indeed was it about this observation that gave rise to Kirstens massive and brilliant mono¬ graph?
Now a tradition still purveyed today in ancient history textbooks informs us that Greece is made up of little pockets of plain, surrounded by sea and mountains and cut off from each other, hence determining the formation of miniature city-states. Thessaly -two linked, massive plains of fertile land, gives no cause for such processes -yet by Classical times it was crowded with such poleis (Auda et al. 1991).
In: Les princes de la Protohistoire et l'émergence de l'État. Actes de la table ronde internationale de Naples (1994).
Naples, 1999 (Coll. CJB, 17/Coll. EFR, 252), 43-56.
Source: https://www.persee.fr/doc/efr_0223-5099_1999_act_252_1_6004
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