Editing Polis (section)

===The polis as state===
Polis is usually translated as 'state'. "Politics" is from the adjective ''politika'' formed on polis. It concerned the affairs of the polis and is approximately equivalent to statesmanship.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Today's meaning of politics is the cynical one, referring to popularly reprehensible behavior far removed from statesmanship.}} ''[[Politeia]]'' means what moderns mean by [[government]]. There are certain social activities that are generally agreed to be the concern of the whole community, such as justice and the redress of wrongs, public order, soldiering, and leadership of major events. The institutions that accomplish these goals are the government. It demands to be the object of greatest loyalty and the highest authority in the land. To this end laws are enacted to establish the government. [[Constitution]] as it is used of poleis signifies the social substructure, the people, and the laws of government.

Like polis, ''politeia'' has developed into a battery of meanings.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia | title=πολιτεία | encyclopedia=A Greek-English Lexicon |author1=Liddell | author2=Scott | publisher=Perseus Digital Library |url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aalphabetic+letter%3D*p%3Aentry+group%3D163%3Aentry%3Dpolitei%2Fa}}</ref> This battery reveals the semantic presence of a concept inseparable from any polis; namely, citizenship. The population of a polis must be divided into two types: citizens (''politai''),<ref>{{cite encyclopedia | title=πολίτης | encyclopedia=A Greek-English Lexicon |author1=Liddell | author2=Scott | publisher=Perseus Digital Library |url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aalphabetic+letter%3D*p%3Aentry+group%3D163%3Aentry%3Dpoli%2Fths}}</ref> and non-citizens. The latter are designated by no single term; "non-citizen" is a scholarly classification.<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=80}}</ref> The concept of citizenship means more or less what it does today. Citizens are members of the polity and as such have both rights and obligations for which they are held responsible.

According to Aristotle, a citizen is "a person who is entitled to participate in government".<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|==80}}. The quote is Hansen's paraphrase.</ref> A government that is the hands of its citizens is defined today as a [[republic]], which is one meaning of ''politeia''.

However, a republic is not an exclusive form of government; it is a type of many forms; e.g., democracy, aristocracy, and even limited monarchy. If the people have nothing at all to say, then no republic, no polis exists, and they are not citizens. A polis was above all a constitutional republic. Its citizens on coming of age took an oath to uphold the law, according to Xenophon, usually as part of their mandatory military service.<ref>{{cite journal | first=George | last=Klosko | title=Oaths and Political Obligation in Ancient Greece | journal=History of Political Thought | volume=XLI | number=1 | year=2020 | page=9 |url=https://uva.theopenscholar.com/files/george-klosko/files/oaths%20and%20political%20obligations%20in%20ancient%20greece.pdf}}</ref>

[[File:Γόρτυνα Κρήτης (photosiotas) (27).jpg|thumb|300px|Part of the Gortyn Law Code, an ancient constitution engraved on a wall for public showing at Gortyn, Crete]]
Citizenship was hereditary. Only families could provide young candidates for citizenship, but that did not mean they would be accepted. The government reserved the right to reject applications for citizenship or remove the status later. The ''politeia'' was a federal agency; there was nothing confederate about it. The duty officers did not have to obtain permissions from municipalities to exercise their sworn duties; they acted directly. If there were any legal consequences of these actions the accusers argued either that the magistrates had exceeded their authority or did not exercise it. The defense was a denial and an assertion of performance of duty.

The Copenhagen Study provides more definitive information about citizenship, and yet, it does not cover all the problems. Every polis once it had become so rejected the authority of all previous authoritative organizations and substituted new civic subdivisions, or municipalities, for them. Only citizens could belong to them, and only one per citizen. They were either regional (the deme) or fraternal (tribe, etc.). Furthermore, foreigners, slaves and women were excluded from them.<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=95}}</ref>

Aristotle had said (''Politics'' III.I.9): "Citizenship is limited to the child of citizens on both sides; that is, the child of a citizen father or of a citizen mother ...", which poses a difficulty in the model of the Copenhagen Study: since women cannot be citizens, there can't be any citizen mothers. Hansen proposes a dual citizenship, one for males, and one for females: "Female citizens possessed citizen status and transmitted citizen status to their children, but they did not perform the political activities connected with citizenship. They were astai rather than ''politai''."<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=131}}</ref>

The use of gyne aste, "female citizen", is rare, but it does appear in Herodotus with regard to the matrilineal system of [[Lycia]]. An astos is a male citizen, an aste, a female. One should therefore expect instances of the feminine of ''polites'', which is ''politis'',<ref>{{cite encyclopedia | title=πόλιτις | encyclopedia=A Greek-English Lexicon |author1=Liddell | author2=Scott | publisher=Perseus Digital Library |url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dpo%2Flitis}}</ref> and there are a few instances in major texts. Plato's ''Laws''<ref>{{cite web | author=Plato | title=Laws 7.814c | publisher=Perseus Digital Library |url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0166%3Abook%3D7%3Asection%3D814c}}</ref> speaks of ''politai'' (male) and ''politides'' (female) with reference to a recommendation that compulsory military training be applied to "not only the boys and men in the State, but also the girls and women....".<ref>{{cite web | author=Plato | title=Laws 7.813e | publisher=Perseus Digital Library |url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0166%3Abook%3D7%3Asection%3D813e}}</ref>

[[File:View of the archaeological site of the Areopagus from its fence on September 25, 2020.jpg|thumb|left|300px|Site of the judicial buildings on Areopagus Hill, which Solon made into a supreme court by trusting it with the guardianship of the new constitution he had devised. The top of Areopagus Hill is in the foreground; in the background is another hill, the Akropolis.]]
In the model slaves also cannot be citizens. Although that seems to be generally true, there may be some exceptions. For example, [[Plutarch]]'s ''Solon'' reports that [[Solon]] of Athens was called upon to form a new government in a social crisis, or stasis. The citizenry had been divided into a number of property classes with all the archonships going to the upper class. They had gone into the money-lending business requiring the lower-class borrowers to put up their persons or those of their families for collateral.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Putting up your family was illegal but apparently it was done.}} Defaulters were sold into slavery at home and abroad. Now the lower classes had united and were pushing through a redistribution of property. In a panic, the upper class called on Solon to write a new constitution allowing them to keep their lands.

Solon took the reins as chief archon. Invalidating the previous laws he cancelled the debts, starting with the large one owed him, made debt-slavery illegal, and set free the debt-slaves, going so far as to buy back Athenian citizens enslaved abroad. The price the rebels had to pay was that the upper class kept their land. The classes were re-defined. Now even the propertyless could attend the assemblies and sit on the juries. Apparently for that period in Athens citizens could be slaves, unless the whole story has not been told.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Solon's reforms are too large a topic to cover here. There are many interpretations, no certain answers.}}

Aristotle notes (II IV 12) that to maintain its population early Sparta "used to admit foreigners to their citizenship". A foreigner here is any person from any polis not under Spartan jurisdiction. Whether the practice implies double citizenship is not stated. If it does not, then a change of citizenship, or successful immigration, must be presumed. Otherwise there might be a conflict of interest.

[[File:Lycurgus Giving Law to the People, Jacopo Palma or Bonifazio de' Pitati.jpg|thumb|250px|A symbolic representation of Lycurgus giving the ''politeia'' to the new citizens of Sparta, which would be a political synoecism. There was no physical synoecism, according to Thucydides.]]
A polis is a binding and irrevocable agreement between formerly separate populations to form a united and indissoluable commonwealth. Once the agreement takes effect all previous social arrangements become null and void. The polis demands first loyalty and exercises the power of life or death over its constituents. Its subdivisions and its laws must prevail.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|The resemblance of these ideas to those expressed by the founders of modern nations is not accidental, as those founders were much influenced by classical thought.}}

The organization of the government and the behavior of the constituents  is governed by a constitution, or "laws". The constitution further defines which of the constituents are empowered to conduct government (citizens) and which not (non-citizens). Citizenship is not construed to mean constituency in the polis but is only a status within it. The laws of the polis are binding on all members, regardless of citizenship. The polis is therefore a commonwealth. The type of government, however, may vary.

City-states, therefore, are not necessarily poleis. There must be another, unifying element that made both Athens, Sparta, and the hundreds of other known settlements poleis. The answer is, so to speak, hiding in plain sight: the demonyms. Athens could not be a polis without the Athenians, Lacedaemon without the Lacedaemonians, etc. The general word for these united populations was demos in the Athenian dialect, damos originally and in the Spartan dialect.

Etymologically the demos is not a unification of pre-existing populations, but is a division of a united population into units. The Indo-European root is *dā-, "to divide", extended to *dā-mo-, "division of society".<ref>{{harvnb|Watkins|2009b}} dā-</ref>  Logically the division must be after the unification or there would be nothing to divide. How the whole can be a division is something of a problem. Demos can mean 'the common people', but if these are meant to be opposed to the non-common people then the non-commons must be excluded from the polis, an unlikely conclusion, since it is the non-commons who usually have the most to do with the unification to begin with.

[[File:Map of Athens 200 AD, William Shepherd.jpg|thumb|250px|The demes, or municipalities, of Athens varied over its long history. This map by William Shepherd shows the demes of 200 AD. For a history of the Athenian demes, see [[deme]].]]
The dictionary entry for demos shows that "demos" had a wide range of meanings, including either the whole population of the polis or any municipality of it, but not both for the same polis.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia | title=δῆμος | encyclopedia=A Greek-English Lexicon |author1=Liddell | author2=Scott | publisher=Perseus Digital Library |url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3DD.H.%3Dmos1}}</ref> The exact use depended on the polis; there was no one, universal way to synoecize into a polis. Athens especially used demos for "deme", a municipality. After noting "there was a grey area between polis and civic subdivision, be it a demos or a kome or a phyle...",<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=30}}</ref> Hansen remarks, "demos does not mean village but municipality, a territorial division of a people...."<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=76}}</ref>

The inventory of poleis published by the Copenhagen Study lists the type of civic subdivisions for each polis for which it could be ascertained (Index 13). Names from a tribal structure are common, such as oikia, [[Genos|gene]] ("clans"), [[Phratry|phratriai]] ("brotherhoods"), and [[Phyle|phylai]] ("tribes"), never the whole range; i.e., clans without brotherhoods, or tribes withous clans, etc., suggesting that the terminology came from a previous social structure not then active. Only one or two are used; exceptionally, several systems of subdivisions superimposed.<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|pp=95–97}}</ref> Hansen suggests that these units, expressed generally in groups of komoi, were chosen because of their former role in synoecism, which also removed the former structures from service in favor of new municipalities.

In addition to these remnants of an earlier social organization are the demoi. All demoi are post-synoecic. Where the municipalities are demoi, they are the decision-making institution; i.e., the assembly (legislative branch) is of demoi. Those units also staff the boule (council) and the dikasterion (law courts). The fact that small poleis have only one demos suggests a way in which the demos could come to mean the whole population.