City-State
Discussion
The difficulties in defining the Polis and the City-State model
From the Wikipedia:
"One of the most influential of these translative models was the French La Cite antique, translated again into English "the Ancient City", by Coulanges. Only to read the title gives credibility to the idea that there is a model type inclusive of all ancient cities, and that the author need only present it without proving it. This type is based on the ancient practice of translating polis in Greek literature to civitas (early form of city) in Latin literature and vice versa.
Coulanges' confidence that the Greek and Italic cities were the same model was based on the then newly discovered Indo-European language: "Go back as far as we may in the history of the Indo-European race, of which the Greeks and Italians are branches,...."[14] The Greeks had a genos, "family"; the Italics, a gens. Corresponding to Greek phratry, a group of families, was the Italic curia. Corresponding to Greek phyle, a tribe of multiple phratries, was the tribus. The comparison of IE cultures is a solid technique, but it is not enough to develop a solid model of "the ancient city", which must take historical disparities into consideration.
From the analogy Coulanges weaves a tale of imaginary history. Families, he asserts, originally lived dispersed and alone (a presumption of Aristotle as well). When the population grew to a certain point, families joined into phratries. Further growth caused phratries to join into tribes, and then tribes into a city. In the city the ancient tribes remained sacrosanct. The city was actually a confederacy of ancient tribes.
Coulange's tale, based on the fragmentary history of priesthoods, does not much resemble the history of cities such as it survives.[j] For example, there was no familial and tribal development of Rome. Livy (Book I), the grandest of the historians of early Rome, portrays a city formed under competitive duress by a collaboration of warriors, some of whom were from among the neighboring Etruscans, led by Romulus and Remus, the true descendants of the Trojans who with the aborigines had earlier formed the Latin people. They were not welcome among the Latins of Alba Longa, and so they had turned to raiding from their base in their seven hills. The myth supposes they had been nourished by a she-wolf and lived a wild life camping in the country. They were, however, supported by an ally. Evander had led a colony from Arcadia before the Trojan War and had placed a polis (Livy's urbs) on one of the hills named Pallantium, later becoming Palatine. He had actually raised the Trojan boys and supported them now. When the band of marauders became populous enough Romulus got them to agree to a synoecism of settlements in the hills to form a new city, Rome, to be walled in immediately. Remus had to be sacrificed because he had set a precedent of jumping over the wall in mockery of it.
There were no families, no phratries, no tribes, except among the already settled Latins, Greeks, and Etruscans. The warriors acquired a social structure by kidnapping the nearby Italic Sabines ("the Rape of the Sabine Women") and settling the matter by agreeing on a synoecism with the Sabines also, who were Latins. Alba Longa was ignored, later subdued. The first four tribes were not the result of any previous social evolution. They were the first municipal division of the city manufactured for the purpose. They were no sort of confederacy. Rome initially was ruled by Etruscan kings.
Coulanges work was followed by the innovation of the English city-state by W. Warde Fowler in 1893.[17] The Germans had already invented the word in their own language: Stadtstaat, "city-state", referring to the many one-castle principates that abounded at the time. The name was applied to the polis by Herder in 1765. Fowler anglicised it: "It is, then, a city-state that we have to deal with in Greek and Roman history; a state in which the whole life and energy of the people, political, intellectual, religious, is focused at one point, and that point a city."[18] He applied the word polis to it,[19] explaining that, "The Latin race, indeed, never realised the Greek conception ... but this was rather owing to their less vivid mental powers than to the absence of the phenomenon."
Polis is thus often translated as 'city-state'. The model, however, fares no better than any other. City-states no doubt existed, but so also did many poleis that were not city-states. The minimum semantic load of this hyphenated neologism is that the referent must be a city and must be a sovereign state. As a strict rule, the definition fails on its exceptions. A polis may not be urban at all, as was pointed out by Thucydides regarding the "polis of the Lacedaemonians", that it was "composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas". Moreover, around the five villages of Lacedaemon, which had been placed in formerly Achaean land, were the villages of the former Achaeans, called the Perioeci ("dwellers round"). They had been left as supposedly free poleis by the invaders, but they were subject to and served the interests of the Dorian poleis. They were not city-states, failing the criterion of sovereignty.
Lacedaemon by the city-state rule thus falls short of being a polis. The earlier Achaean acropolis stood at the edge of the valley and was decrepit and totally unused. Lacedaemon had neither a city nor an acropolis, but all the historiographers referred to it as a polis. The rule of the city-state persisted until late in the 20th century, when the accumulation of mass data and sponsored databases made possible searches and comparisons of multiple sources not previously possible, a few of which are mentioned in this article.
Hansen reports that the Copenhagen Centre found it necessary to "dissociate the concept of polis from the concepts of independence and autonomia". They were able to define a class of "dependent poleis" to consist of 15 types, all of which the ancient sources call poleis, but were not entirely sovereign, such as cities that had been independent, but were later synoecized into a larger polis, new colonies of other poleis, forts, ports, or trading posts some distance removed from their mother poleis, poleis that had joined a federation with binding membership, etc. The Perioeci were included in this category.
When the models are set aside as primary sources (which they never were) it is clear that historiography must be founded on what the authors and inscriptions say. Moreover, there is a time window for the active polis. The fact that polis was used in the Middle Ages to translate civitas does not make these civitates into poleis. The Copenhagen Study uses quite a few evidential indications of a probable polis, in addition to the manuscripts and inscriptions, some of which are victory in the Panhellenic Games,[26] participation in the games, having an official agent, or proxenos, in another polis,[26] presence of civic subdivisions, presence of citizens and a Constitution (Laws)."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polis)
More Information
* Book: Sovereign City: The City-State Ancient and Modern. By Geoffrey Parker. Univ.of Chicago Press, 2005
URL = https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo3534946.html
"The city has had a rich and tumultuous history, evolving from a powerful political entity in ancient times to its modern role as a local hub of tourism and commerce. Sovereign City examines the nature of the city's ever-changing status, as Geoffrey Parker investigates the city-state as a geopolitical form and explores its distinctive niche within different types of states. This probing work analyzes the various forms of city-states throughout world history, from the Greek polis, which Plato and Aristotle considered the perfect type of state, to the Roman imperial capital, to the political role of the city in early Islamic society. Parker also considers the revival of the European city-state in late medieval and Renaissance Italy and northern Europe, which culminated in the Hanseatic League, and how the rise of the nation-state contributed to the decline of the city-state.
Sovereign City is a wide-ranging and vigorous examination that seeks to understand the role of the city-state from the birth of Western civilization through its re-emergence at the dawn of the twenty-first century in the Far East and Islamic world."