Editing Polis (section)

==Modern models==

===The subjective element of a model===
[[File:MonacoLibreDeDroits.jpg|thumb|250px|[[Monaco]], a modern city-state on the south coast of [[France]]. Monaco bears no resemblance to any aspect of an ancient Greek polis.]]
In modern [[historiography]] of the ancient world πόλις is often [[transliteration|transliterated]] to polis without any attempt to translate it into the language of the historiographer. For example, [[Eric Voegelin]] wrote a work in English entitled "The World of the Polis".<ref>{{harvnb|Voegelin|1957}}</ref> In works such as this the author intends to define polis himself; i.e., to present a [[model]] of society from one or more of a [[list of ancient Greek cities]] (poleis) culled from ancient Greek literature and inscriptions.

For example, Voegelin describes a model in which "town settlements" existed in the Aegean for a few thousand years prior to the [[Dorian invasion]]s, forming an "aggregate, the pre-Doric city".<ref>{{harvnb|Voegelin|1957|p=114}}</ref> This type of city is not to be regarded as "the Hellenic type of the polis". The Greeks set adrift by the Dorian invasions countered by joining ([[synoecism]]) to form the Hellenic poleis. The polis can thus be dated to this defensive resettlement period (the Dark Age). Quite a few poleis fit the model, no doubt, which was widely promulgated in the 20th century.

[[Classical Athens]], however, is a paradox in this model, to which Voegelin has no answer. He says, "in the most important instance, that of Athens, the continuity between the Aegean settlement and the later polis seems to have been unbroken." It seems a matter of simple logic that if Athens was a Hellenic polis in the time of the Hellenic poleis and was continuous with the pre-Doric city phase, then pre-Doric Athens must have been a Hellenic polis even then. The model fails in its chief instance.

A second approach to the modelling of the polis is not to use the word ''polis'' at all, but to translate it into the language of the historiographer. The model is thus inherent in the translation, which has the disadvantage of incorporating a priori assumptions as though they were substantiated facts and were not the pure speculations they actually are.

===Problems with Coulanges' ancient city===
[[File:Massy Plaque Fustel de Coulanges.JPG|thumb|200px|left|Plaque over the door of Coulanges' last residence]]
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.<ref name=alpha>{{harvnb|Sakellariou|1989|p=19|loc=Preface}}</ref>

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,...."<ref>{{harvnb|Coulanges|1901|p=16}}</ref> 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 [[Roman tribe|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 [[Confederation|confederacy]] of ancient tribes.<ref>{{harvnb|Coulanges|1901|p=168}}</ref>

[[File:Romulus and Remus 羅慕盧斯與瑞摩斯 - panoramio.jpg|250px|thumb|Romulus and Remus, descendants of Trojan Aeneas, having been cast away to die, being suckled by the wolf on the banks of the Tiber prior to their rescue by Evander, king of a polis, a colony from Arcadia, already on what became the Palatine Hill (site of the imperial "palace"). There are no Italic tribes in this story.]]
Coulange's tale, based on the fragmentary history of priesthoods, does not much resemble the history of cities such as it survives.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Hanson's view on Coulanges' view of the formation of a polis is "In my opinion the holistic view of the polis is skewed ....".<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=130}}</ref>}} 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 of Pallantium|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.

===Problems with the city-state===
Coulanges work was followed by the innovation of the English city-state by W. Warde Fowler in 1893.<ref>{{harvnb|Sakellariou|1989|p=20}}</ref> 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 [[Johann Gottfried Herder|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."<ref>{{harvnb|Fowler|1895|p=8}}</ref> He applied the word ''polis'' to it,<ref name=fowler6>{{harvnb|Fowler|1895|p=6}}</ref> 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."<ref name=fowler6/>

[[File:Antique Map of Classical City of Sparta.jpg|thumb|left|300px|Antique map of the five villages of Sparta. The Eurotas River is to the right. The central citadel shown, site of the former Mycenaean palace, was abandoned.]]
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.<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=3}}. "the term ''polis'' is often used synonymously with the term ''city-state'', and the concepts behind the two terms are often, but erroneously, thought to be co-extensive."</ref> A polis may not be urban at all, as was pointed out by [[Thucydides]]<ref>''Peloponnesian War'' I.10</ref>{{refn|group=lower-alpha|The full passage illustrated along with its significance for the urbanization of a polis can be found at {{cite web | first=Peter J. | last=Brand | title=Athens & Sparta: Democracy vs. Dictatorship | publisher=University of the People | access-date=3 April 2023 |url=https://my.uopeople.edu/pluginfile.php/57436/mod_book/chapter/38899/HIST1421.U1.Athens.Sparta.pdf}}}} 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").{{refn|group=lower-alpha|The 19th- and early 20th-century view that Perioeci and helots both came from the Achaeans was questioned because of Spartan abuse of the helots yet acceptance of Perioeci into comradeship. Hammond in Cambridge Ancient History reiterates an alternative view that, while the helots did descend from the Achaeans, the Perioeci were a mixture of Achaeans and Dorians who had settled in Laconia prior to the creation of a military state by the laws of [[Lycurgus (lawgiver)|Lycurgus]] in the late 9th century BC. {{cite encyclopedia | first=N.G.L. | last=Hammond | title=The Emergence of the City-state from the Dark Age | encyclopedia=Cambridge Ancient History | year=2008 | edition=2nd | volume=III Part 1 | pages=738–744}}}}  They had been left as supposedly free poleis by the invaders, but they were subject to and served the interests of the Dorian poleis.<ref>{{cite book | first=H. | last=Michell | title=Sparta | location=Cambridge | publisher=Cambridge University Press | year=1964 | page=64 | quote=The second main division of the Lacedaemonioan state comprised the Perioeci, 'dwellers in the outskirts'.... That these formed an integral part of the state, and that they were free, and, to some imperfectly defined degree, self-ruling but without the same political status as the Spartans, are all fairly clear facts....whether 'Dorians' or 'Achaeans'... are not so clear....}}</ref> They were not city-states, failing the criterion of sovereignty.<ref>{{cite web | author=Graves, C.E. | title=Commentary on Thucydides: Book 4 Chapter VIII | publisher=Perseus Digital Library | access-date=10 April 2023 |url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0036%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D8}}</ref>

[[Sparta|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.<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=87}}</ref>

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.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|The Copenhagen Poleis Project considered any mention of a polis in an ancient source to be solid evidence. Hansen states that they found over 11,000 instances of polis.<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=12}}</ref>}} 
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,<ref name=hansen107>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=107}}</ref> participation in the games,<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=103}}</ref> having an official agent, or proxenos, in another polis,<ref name=hansen107/> presence of civic subdivisions, presence of citizens and a Constitution (Laws).