Editing Polis (section)

===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.