Editing Polis (section)

===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).