The first Greek city-states

The story

A land of mountains and sea

To understand the Greek poleis, you have to start from the map. Greece is a land of mountains, narrow valleys, islands and gulfs. Getting from one valley to the next was tiring, and by sea you needed a boat and a bit of courage. That is why, in the centuries after the great palaces of the Bronze Age collapsed, Greek communities lived in separate groups, each with its own land and its own habits. When these communities began to grow again, the mountains acted as natural borders: nobody could easily rule over all the others.

What is a polis?

The word “polis” is usually translated as “city-state”, and the name already says a lot. It was a city, but it was also an independent state, with its own territory, laws, magistrates, army, calendar of festivals and protecting gods. Athens had Athena, Olympia had Zeus. Scholars think the first poleis took shape between about 850 and 750 BC, so around the date our site gives as “about 800”. There is no birthday: it was a slow change that lasted generations.

The first sure evidence of a polis as a community that decides things with its own laws comes from an inscription found at Dreros, in Crete, dating from the middle of the 7th century BC. Before that there are only clues: sanctuaries, tombs, the remains of settlements.

What a polis looked like

A typical polis had several parts. The acropolis, the “high city”, was a fortified hill with the temples and sanctuaries: it was the centre of religious life. Lower down was the agora, the great square where people met, bought and sold, talked and, in cities that had an assembly, voted. Around it stood the houses, usually simple, with the poorest in the lower part of the city, called the “asty”. Outside the walls stretched the “chora”, the countryside, which fed everyone and was considered extremely important. Many families lived off small fields of four or five hectares, and part of the territory belonged to the whole community. If the city was on the coast, the harbour was another vital place.

Sanctuaries had a special role. Gathering for the same festivals, in front of the same altars, helped groups of nearby villages feel like a single community. In many cases the polis was born exactly like this: scattered villages came together around a centre, with its walls and its temple.

Who belonged to the polis

Being a citizen meant taking part in decisions and, if needed, fighting. But the citizens with full rights were only adult free men. Women, foreigners living in the city (the “metics”) and slaves were left out. Metics could work and trade, but they needed a citizen to vouch for them and had to pay a special tax. In Athens, by some estimates, slaves made up between a third and a fifth of the inhabitants; in Sparta the helots greatly outnumbered the citizens; according to Herodotus, at Plataea there were seven helots following each Spartiate (the real ratio is debated).

What united the citizens was “isonomia”, the fact that all free people had to obey the same laws. It did not mean that the people governed everywhere: in some poleis a few rich men ruled, in others a single tyrant, in others still, like Athens, an assembly. But the idea that the rules applied to all citizens became the heart of Greek politics.

Many cities, one people

The poleis were jealous of their freedom and often quarrelled, but they felt part of the same world. They spoke Greek, honoured the same gods and went together to the games at Olympia. When an outside enemy threatened them all, like the Persians, they could unite, although it was not easy.

Between about the 8th and the 6th centuries BC, many poleis sent groups of citizens to found new cities far away, from the Black Sea to Sicily and southern Italy. In the end a very large share of the Greeks, according to some estimates about 40%, lived in the colonies. Each new colony began as an independent polis, with the same institutions as its mother city: that is how the model spread across the Mediterranean.

The end of the poleis

The weakness of the poleis was exactly their strength: each wanted to go it alone. Wars between cities, like the one between Athens and Sparta, wore them down. In 338 BC, at Chaeronea, the Macedonian king Philip II defeated the Greek poleis, and his son Alexander the Great took advantage of this to conquer an empire. In the Hellenistic age the cities kept existing, with their theatre and their square, but now they depended on the great kings. Those of southern Italy, Magna Graecia, came under Roman rule between the 4th and the 3rd centuries BC.