John Ma: Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
The ancient Greek polis or ‘city-state’ only seems familiar to us, having read the historians, philosophers, and playwrights who flourished within them (well, mostly in Athens, which didn’t always allow its philosophers to flourish). But readers of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cité Antique have glimpsed the alienness of the polis, how entirely unlike modern states, especially modern liberal states, it was. In our time, the open society continues to have its enemies, but in antiquity there were no open societies. Enemies were rival poleis, rival empires, and rival factions contending with one’s own regime no regime asserted liberty in our sense of the word, that is, personal liberty held against the state. No polis justified itself by securing, or at least claiming to secure, natural rights held by individual persons. Whatever regime a polis might have had, it was exclusive. The ancient regime also exemplified religion in the original sense of the word: the binding of the people to divinely inspired laws given to that polis. Religious liberty as we think of it was unknown, even if a few philosophers asserted freedom from religion.
In this magisterial study, Columbia University professor John Ma unfolds the history of the polis with particular attention to how its rulers adapted themselves to the pressures of war and factionalism. He defines a polis as a small territory (typically about 300 square miles), ruled by adult male citizens, with an overall population that included slaves, freeborn foreigners, women, and children, all excluded from share in that rule. Although the citizens owned property, their rights to their property were defined by their fellow citizens, or in a tyranny, by the one ruler. “The polis defines itself as commonwealth (koinon), a community (koinonia) of citizens, a constitution (politeia)”—that is, by “the terms that Aristotle explicitly deploys to describe the rise and the essence of the polis in his Politics.” Throughout, Ma inclines toward Aristotle’s understanding of Greek politics (albeit with some qualifications), emphasizing the prudential ways in which it was ruled, while acknowledging the religion-bound character of the polis somewhat in passing.
But if “Aristotle witnessed” the emergence of the polis, why did it emerge? And why did it endure so long, if at least in attenuated form, from 350 BCE to 400 AD—into the Roman empire?
Ma begins with the prehistory of the polis. He emphasizes that there was “no clear path of development,” no historically inevitable march, during this time; things might have turned out differently. And in any case, reliable information is hard to find, limited as scholars are to archeology and poetry.
From 1400 to 1200 BCE, the Late Bronze Age, lands bordering the Aegean Sea featured “palace-entered polities” which controlled large territories and populations, essentially as estates. Rulers determined who would use the land, for what purposes, practicing what Ma delicately calls “the mobilization of labor” for fortifications, places, hydraulic works, and monuments to themselves and the gods. These were warrior polities, “monarchical, hierarchical, bureaucratic”—in many ways “the antithesis of the later form of the polis.” Departing from Aristotle, Ma denies that “the polis grows out of the primitive ‘tribal’ structures”; tribes actually came into being at the same time as the poleis did; these were “interlocking processes.” This could occur because smaller communities existed among the palatial estates as “clustervilles” that stood ready to rise up and expand, asserting self-rule, after the estates collapsed.
It is only in the late eighth century BCE that the poems of Homer and Hesiod “provide sustained political statements about communities, values, and action.” By then, societies ruled by the aristoi or “best men” and by the basileis or kings (a title descended from the palatial and post-palatial power holders) become visible. These “lordly elements often found themselves in tension with “a strong, explicitly sense of community and public interests.” Rulers remained warlike; “glory and honor [were] obtained by killing and stripping opponents, or by obtaining plunder.” In peace, there was feasting, leisure, luxury, all carried out “in an unflinching theater of distinction.” The lords modeled their lives on the lives of the gods, justifying their rule as saviors of the people from enemies (including enemy gods) and therefore entitled to near-godlike status—ordering religious rituals and judging disputes. Ma warns against confusing these communities with feudalism, which exhibits a relatively stable hierarchy. Warlike competition and the “social reciprocity” of lavish feasts made them far more contested than the feudal states of Christendom. Moreover, the king had no serfs or peasants paying rent to him; he was a landowner ruling a household which included slaves. And he needed to pay heed to the activities of the councils, in which the community met, engaged in religious rituals of their own and upheld a “sense of the common good.” Kings competed with one another in war, parleyed in feasts, but also needed to exhibit “the sense of obligation toward the community.” “Collective opinion” mattered, although the councils themselves met only at the behest of the king. “The world of the Homeric epics is about the city: the community finds its expression in a nucleated built environment, defined by walls, sharing public spaces”—a human artifact that is the setting for norms, obligations, and community power that enforces these things, and which symbolizes them. “This was not yet the polis,” but the materials for the polis are visible.
To study the polis, one must first turn to the middle of the eight century BCE, when “the first documentary record” of the use of the word appears in the community of Drēros. “The Drerian officials hold power on terms decided by the community, according to permanent, public, known, and stated rules” which have religious sanction; no king convenes the assembly. Among those things ordained by assemblies are tribes; that is, tribes are political institutions, governmental forms, a means of organizing the population. “The working of state institutions probably required the distribution of the population into such groups to ensure an openly fair sharing of power.” Other groups—dining groups (for example, the famous Spartan messes), drinking groups, phratrai, or “brotherhoods,” genē —now appear, and even militaries are reorganized, with ordinary soldiers sharing the spoils of war along with the heroes. War is now understood as rightly waged for the benefit of the community, the defense of that community against foreign powers in conflicts over territorial borders along with political dominance or freedom. Politicians therefore begin to speak of union as clearly as they do today, searching for commonalities uniting town and countryside, town dwellers with farmers. The polis was not only a real place but an “imagined community.”
The laws now “strive for universalizing force and comprehensiveness, with far-reaching authority within society.” In Ma’s view, this is no longer only religious but rational law, with categories of crime set down in a logical way, including crimes against the polis itself, and with considerations of “how far the law should stay unchanged, how law itself can be changed” in an orderly way. The ‘rule of law,’ as distinguished from the rule of persons, gives rise to a distinction between the law and rulers’ decrees, with the greater authority going to the laws. Laws also bolster attempts at political administration, including the administration of finances. Collection and expenditure of revenues become orderly, too; “the polis was hence a form of political economy.”
“The most important and durable aspect of the consolidation of poleis and their interaction is the pattern of mutual, self-aware recognition [of other poleis] as peers.” Poleis competed with one another in games in which athletes represented their communities. They erected shrines and held festivals attended by foreigners, as seen in Pindar’s poetry.
In the following centuries, poleis increasingly prospered, offering the stability that led to increases of population and of settlements. They also inclined toward egalitarianism, if not yet toward democratic regimes, having in many instances replaced the arbitrary rule of “the best men.” True, “the demos, the commons, are never simply the whole community,” but neither are they the elites. The aristoi of course challenged, or attempt to adapt to, these egalitarian trends, often by replacing “aristocracy of birth” with “various forms of competition” intended to establish superiority on the ground of innate strengths of body and (especially) of soul. This ensured the continuation of warlikeness and displays of wealth. But elite ‘pushback’ seldom stayed “the appearance of public institutions and rules for power-sharing, the clear location of legitimacy of power in communal interests and universally applicable rules, communicated to the whole community which they concern”—a communication, it might be added, made feasible by the small size of the poleis. While “in the story of the polis the rich will always be with us, the crucial question, however, is that of the place, and the nature, of these wealth and power elites, once the communities take the developmental path of strong integration that characterizes the polis.”
Tensions between the many who were poor and the few who were rich (with ambitious would-be ‘ones’ waiting in the shadows, hoping to seize upon disorder and exalt themselves above both) led to conflicts over regimes. As described by Aristotle, regimes consist of rulers, ruling institutions or offices fashioned for their purposes, a way of life, and a purpose or set of purposes for the polis. “One solution to the travails of integration was to consolidate strongly a small group of stakeholders chosen on grounds of birth and especially wealth, and to exclude the rest of the population of the territory” from rule—an oligarchic regime, as in Sparta and Crete. In these poleis, “the restricted group” of rulers must “present itself as the whole community,” often by making a “claim to divine or heroic descent.” “The other, diametrically opposite path was to structure the polis through wide inclusiveness, by the integration of a large segment of the adult male population as citizens, in strict distinction to noncitizens, namely foreigners and especially the enslaved”—a democratic regime, as in Athens. It, too, claimed divine sanction, as when the founder of democracy in Athens, Solon, declaimed: “Our polis will never perish by the destiny of Zeus or the will of the happy immortal gods—for such is the great-hearted guardian, might-fathered daughter,” Athena, “who holds her hands over us.” Thanks to her, eunomiē, literally good-lawness, “makes all things orderly and adjusted, and often lays fetters upon the unrighteous.”
Enter the “classical” polis, seen from 480 to 180 BCE. It did not begin auspiciously. What Ma calls the “Hundred Years’ War” between Athens and Sparta does indeed resemble Europe’s Hundred Years’ War between the Plantagenet and Valois dynasties, both conflicts drawing neighboring states into the fighting as allies. With the advantages of territorial and population size, Athens began as the hegemon, the lasting traces of which may be seen in “the astonishing ensemble of marble buildings on the Akropolis”—symbols of religio-political authority. In effect, the Athenians had imitated the Persian empire the Greeks had united to defeat.
Sparta eventually won the war, thanks to financial aid from that empire, enjoying hegemony for the next thirty years only to collapse in its turn, having overstretched. Both Athens and Sparta provoked resistance from smaller poleis, forming coalitions against their oppressors, as “the mounting costs of raw power politics doomed imperial aspirations.”
These vicissitudes did not break the poleis, however; they reinforced it as a state form. Within that form, Athens famously continued to exemplify democracy, Sparta oligarchy, with various mixtures of those regimes seen elsewhere. In Athens, democracy without any substantial bureaucracy made for “immediate responsive[ness] to popular decisions,” decisions demagogues attempted to sway. As seen in Socrates’ trial, these decisions included judging, not only lawmaking and policy. “The assumptions between democratic practice and its institutional logic were well understood by critics of democracy: Plato attacks the very epistemological basis of mass decision as a principle in his fictionalized portrayals of Socrates.” Not only philosophers but the wealthy felt the pinch, as the latter bore heavy financial burdens.
Sparta saw oligarchy, “the rule of the few, the better, the rich.” Whereas corruption of the people in Athens took the forms of rhetoric/demagoguery and sophistry from itinerant teachers, the Spartan rulers corrupted the people the old-fashioned way: with money and patronage. Like most oligarchs, the Spartan politeuma or ruling body presented itself as aristocratic/virtuous, claiming to bring “order balance, self-control, and even justice” to the polis. “The few wielded power on grounds of merit,” the few claimed, inasmuch as the rich were too rich to be corrupted or greedy and too smart to make bad decisions. By contrast, “democracy could be portrayed as irrationality and madness.” Oligarchs struggled and often factionalized over the question of whether to require equality among themselves or to establish a hierarchy of merit.
Whatever regime it established, the polis itself remained and strengthened as attempt at achieving hegemony by one polis or another floundered. In a sense, the polis became the new ‘hegemon,’ universalizing itself throughout Greece in what Ma calls “the great convergence.” “The poleis were all militarized (aligning militiamen, elite troops, and even their own fleets), heavily fortified, and endowed with a strong sense of identity, interests, and continuity.” They were “remarkably successful at playing the long game and achieving freedom”—that is, autarkia or self-rule—in the Hellenistic period. To resist the power of the larger poleis, the smaller ones formed leagues, “uniting autonomous cities within common decision-making processes and institutional frameworks to produce highly effective shared goods on the social, economic, and political fronts.” Disputes between poleis could also be arbitrated by third parties, in “a network of peer-polity interaction.” The Macedonian conquests (350-280 BCE) removed the possibility of hegemony from individual poleis, but the poleis adapted to the foreign hegemon, retaining “a strong sense of identity, interests, and continuity,” backed by sufficient military force to make “the constant exercise of force” against them unsustainable. Moreover, Macedon wasn’t the only empire in the Mediterranean world, a the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleukids of Syria, and others competed for influence, enabling the poleis to play them off against each other.
As poleis increased in number, so did regimes of ‘the many’—some of them democracies, others ‘mixed regimes,’ as Aristotle calls them. Ma attributes this to the increasingly peaceful atmosphere of the great convergence, an atmophere in which the military prowess of oligarchs and monarchs could not thrive because it became less eneessary. “Negotiations and compromise” among and within poleis became the norm, a norm better suited to popular self-government. Politics itself became less sharp-edged, as disputes over regimes faded or, to put it in Ma’s more academic prose, “as a consequence of decoupling of claims to excellence from political domination, association and groups vied for distinctiveness without centrifugality.” Civic life became more political in Aristotle’s sense of the term: reciprocal, a matter of ruling and being ruled in turn. Elites didn’t disappear; they adapted to popular rule by serving the public good as defined by ‘the public’—serving in office and loaning money to the polis during their terms of service, exhibiting evidence of good character in their public dealings, and submitting to public scrutiny of their actions while in office.
But then a new and more formidable empire forced its way into the Aegean. By the middle of the second century BCE, the Romans had established their empire in the region. Ma asks, “What did Roman control change in the polis?” And “to what extent did polis culture shape the forms taken by the Roman conquest, and subsequently, by the Roman empire?” The answers turn out to be quite interesting because neither conquest nor empire were simple, straightforward things.
With the Hellenistic period’s Macedonian hegemon broken and the regional Aetolian and Achaian leagues gone, “the poleis recognized that the axis of the world had tilted.” Embassies to Rome were dispatched. Some Greek politicians dragged their feet while others hastened to cozy up to the apparent masters of the new world order. For its part, the Roman Senate did not press matters too closely. Rome had defeated the major Aegean powers but hadn’t really attempted to conquer Greece. As a result, “local ‘liberty” continued under a haze of “negotiation, litigation, boundary-pushing, and consultation.” Ma calls this the “Indian Summer” of the polis as “civic freedom was paradoxically an integral part of Roman provincialization.” It might be added that this was nothing new in ancient imperial practice. Cyrus the Great didn’t mind sending the Israelites back to Jerusalem, didn’t mind if they ruled themselves with their own laws, so long as they paid him tribute while doing so. Ancient empires were impressive in size but not so impressive in their capacity to centralize full political authority over their subjects. Their subjects often were not entirely subjected.
“It is clear that Roman provincialization in Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor coexisted with the general freedom of the island poleis of the Aegean.” This included the perpetuation of more or less democratic regimes there, no longer pressured by “the big regional leagues,” which of course had been centered much closer than Rome. Nor did the prestige of the gentlemen decline, as they continued to support the democracies monetarily. Democrats needed oligarchs and oligarchs needed democrats: politics, ruling and being ruled, continued. And some Romans were impressed; “this world offered a model for Cicero.” “It is worth remembering that the debates of the second century BCE polis, rather than simply ‘Hellenistic philosophy,’ influenced Roman political thought.”
“Local freedom meant litigating out a situational space of freedom, a bundle of organized privileges within the flow of Roman power,” a matter of “constant hard work” for the rulers of the poleis. Increasingly, Greek politicians “equated freedom with friendship of Rome.” This is what Polybius had feared: a gradual, ‘creeping’ sort of imperialism, a movement from Roman hegemony to Roman empire over Greece. When Athens finally rebelled against Rome in 86 BCE, it was too late. It was Cicero himself who asserted Roman oversight of Athenian finances while proclaiming Athenian freedom: “Never mind—at least they think they have autonomia.“
In Cicero’s time, Rome itself saw regime change, from the republic to monarchy. “Under Caesar and preponderantly under Augustus, colonies of Roman veterans were installed in the Peloponnese, the norther Aegean, and in Asia Minor.” That is, monarchs, having come to power by military means, prudently saw to it that the soldiers who had boosted them into rule were dispersed and rewarded, well away from the capital city, enhancing Roman influence in the imperial territories. Nonetheless, once again the poleis proved resilient, as their Roman overseers began to adopt the Greek language and “Greek civic ideologies and images.” if the polis requires self-rule to be a polis, self-rule did persist.
But it persisted in increasingly attenuated form. “The statues of Roman emperors joined the statues of the gods in temples,” their images appeared on Greek coins, and the “ruler cult” flourished, expressing “a communal understanding of dependency before Roman power” and upon the peace it secured. Indeed, “the emperor decided directly on the very existence of a polis as a corporate, recognized entity with institutions.” The emperor appointed provincial governors empowered to issue laws and policies and enjoying judicial authority as well. Greek cities participated in the punishments meted out by the courts, guarding prisoners and providing “the facilities for executions in the arena as gladiators or by wild beasts.” The emperor also imposed taxes, with the responsibility for their collection imposed upon the poleis. “The cities thus acted as instruments in their own exploitation.” With these progressive tightenings of rule, “we are not quite seeing bureaucracy at work, but a routine regular attention from the center, generating the concrete manifestations of the state.”
The empire still functioned by the process of city petitioning and Roman response to the petitions, so a significant taste of political rule remained. “Even in the Roman empire, the polis never quite forgot its origins as a state, a self-ruling community. On the Roman side, petition and response “allowed the empire to show itself repeatedly, consistently, as a field of rationality, legal-mindedness, and responsiveness,” as “a political rather than an administrative entity.” “Viewed coldly, the Roman empire appears as the end of the line for civic autonomy,” but the Greeks, throughout their history, have seldom viewed things coldly. And, as Ma insists, for the Romans, the poleis‘s “internal political and social order had to be preserved, in ways centered on the continuity of public goods” in order not to kill the golden-egg-laying geese. Thus, “for all the modifications, simplifications, and developments brought about by Roman power, the political life of the Greek city-state remains recognizable from earlier times.”
Still another regime change took place with conversion of Constantine to Christianity in the third century AD. Gradually, Church bishops replaced not only the existing priests, destroying or repurposing the temples, but also “took over some of the roles of the civic elites”—representing a polis before the emperor, for example. More importantly, the division between the regime of the emperor and the regime of the church wiped out the religio-political character of the polis, as Fustel de Coulanges saw and as Machiavelli deplored. Between Empire and Church, “the status of citizen (politēs) disappears, replaced by a concept of mere inhabitant.” By the sixth century, “the ancient city faded out of recognition.”
Ma mistakenly takes Aristotle to be an institutionalist, simply, overlooking one of the elements of his idea of the politeia or regime, the Bios ti or way of life. But Ma does not himself ignore that element, pointing to the festivals, associations, and “public performances” in the poleis, as well to the continued importance of public opinion. The public opinion that directed the way of life of the polis was in turn shaped by religion. “The polis was what the polis did, and what the polis did was to worship and honor the gods, through ritual events and material manifestations.” It is true that it is Fustel, not Aristotle, who emphasizes this feature of the polis, but Aristotle’s account is also a defense of philosophy, an activity not always in accord with political religion. The prophetic religion, Christianity, which had suffered persecution along with philosophy so long as the ancient civic religion prevailed, dealt with that religion by pushing it aside. Yet insofar as it then took on civic responsibilities, too, the prophetic religion in turn opened itself to philosophic scrutiny and political tensions. Difficulties persisted.
Looking back at the polis, Ma admits, as Marxists insist, that the polis had ‘contradictions’ within it, notably the contradiction between the few who were rich and the many who were poor. But he also observes that these contradictions register the diversity of the polis; such tensions occur in an organization of any substantial size. “The polis, as a koinon or participatory community of citizens, is different in nature from predatory extractive states” inasmuch as “revenue-raising activities are directly purposed toward the solidaristic provision of public goods…through investment or redistribution.” It is indeed a ‘commonwealth.’ It typically offered some protection for rich and poor alike. As Benjamin Constant remarked, it was not a liberal state in the modern sense, protecting the rights of individuals against the state. As a ‘closed’ society, it did not welcome foreign immigrants. An of course it rested upon slavery, which enabled citizens the leisure to engage in politics in the first place. But one must ask, what ancient society was not exclusive (except for the empires, which ‘included foreigners by conquering them) and slave-owning? The polis achieved political liberty for many of its inhabitants, which is more than can be said for any type of community previous to it, or of many that followed it.
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