I will admit, throughout much of the time I spent learning about ancient civilizations
as a child, I always just kind of assumed that the Greeks were united in their own empire,
kind of like…
most other cultures you tend to learn about.
I mean if Rome, Egypt, Persia, China, and all the rest had singular unified empires,
then why not Greece?
Although we may learn about all the people, culture, history, and accomplishments of Ancient
Greece as just…
Ancient Greece, the cities surrounding the Aegean Sea in the 1st millennium BC were of
course far from united.
What we call “Ancient Greece” was actually a collection of different city-states all
separate yet intertwined through alliances, religion, and culture.
So what were these city-states and how exactly did they function, both within an without?
First, let‘s take a look at what exactly an Ancient Greek city-state was.
The term polis (plural poleis) is often used as a shorthand for these city-states, as it
is the Greek word for city (and indeed what these cities were classified as in their hey-day),
so that’s the term we’ll be going with purely for simplicity.
There were a total of over 1,000 poleis spread throughout the Mediterranean, dotting the
coastlines of not just modern Greece and Turkey, but also Libya, Egypt, Italy, France and other
nearby countries, some even all the way in Afghanistan.
Some of the most well known of these poleis though included Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes,
Rhodes, Ephesus, Miletus, Cyrene, and Syracuse.
A polis generally encompassed a particular city, the Asty, as well as its immediate surroundings,
including any farms, harbors, or smaller towns servicing the city, classified as the khôra.
At the center of the asty was the central agora, and often a fortified citadel known
as the acropolis-- also sidenote, indeed while we might call this part of Athens the Acropolis,
other poleis had their own acropolises, the one we all know of today is just the Acropolis
of Athens.
Poleis frequently featured a central agora, temples, gymnasia and theaters, and walls
to protect themselves, but buildings alone do not make a city-state.
Poleis were effectively independent political entities, with their own governments (whether
democratic or oligarchic or even tyrannical), their own minted coins, and often even their
own colonies.
People of a specific polis were also often granted citizenship within that specific polis--
and indeed the concept of citizenship is said to have first emerged among the Greek poleis--
the inhabitants of a polis though were also separated into different classes.
At the top were free men born legitimately to citizen parents, who were entitled with
the right to vote, run for office, and bear arms, though they were also obligated to serve
in battle.
This was only true after the age of 18 though, and their female relatives were a step below,
offered full legal rights but no political rights, as it was the adult male citizen who
was supposed to represent their interests.
Below them were the metics-- not medics, metics, derived from the Greek métoikoi, meaning
“transdwellers”-- who were basically foreign citizens with full legal and political rights
in a different polis, but no political rights in their polis of residence, and might have
also had to pay a tax.
Liberated slaves were also given this status in Athens.
Lastly were the non-liberated slaves, who were basically property with no rights whatsoever.
All of the Greek poleis had a common Hellenic culture and language (eh, more or less, we’ll
get to that later), as well as a common religious tradition.
However, the people we collectively label as “the Greeks” descended from many different
Greek tribes, the four major of which were the Achaeans, Aeolians, Dorians, and Ionians.
In Greek mythology the tribes were descendants of the patriarch Hellen (two L’s, not to
be confused with Helen of Troy), the progenitor of the Greek peoples and terms like Hellenic,
and indeed why the people of the Hellenic Republic call their country Hellada.
Hellen had three sons; Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus, the latter in turn having two sons
of his own; Achaeus and Ion, hopefully you can notice a pattern here.
The Achaeans and Aeolians originated in and around Achaea (or the Peloponnese) and Thessaly
in Central Greece, though the Aeolians would be largely pushed out into the Aegean islands,
possibly through Doric invasions.
Thebes would be a notable example of an Aeolic polis.
The Dorians originated from southern and western Greece, and up into Epirus in modern-day Albania,
near their close cousins the Macedonians.
Some examples of Doric cities include Sparta, Corinth, Megara, Argos, Pylos, and Olympia.
Finally the Ionians were perhaps the most widespread of the four major tribes, spreading
throughout Attica, Euboea, and throughout the Aegean Sea into western Anatolia (or at
least the parts not colonized by Aeolians or Dorians).
The most well known Attic-Ionic cities included Athens, Ephesus, and Miletus.
Inevitably even the dialect of Greek spoken began to change among the poleis, dividing
into a Western, Central, and Eastern group.
After the conquest of Greece by the Macedonians however, and the subsequent conquest of the
Persian Empire and Hellenization of its former territories, a common Attic-based Koine Greek
dialect was put into use as a lingua franca of the region, as would continue to be used
throughout the Roman era.
The ancient Greek poleis also frequently went into competition with one-another (as humans
tend to do), often leading to all out war.
These wars however weren’t just Athens and Sparta duking it out, but involved complex
shifting networks of alliances and treaties, especially once the Persians got involved.
By the 540s BC the Achaemenid Persian Empire had expanded into western Anatolia, and later
Thrace, absorbing many poleis like Ephesus, Miletus, Samos, Byzantion, and Pella into
their realm.
The leadup to the Greco-Persian Wars is a story for another time, but nonetheless the
Ionian Revolts and the 2nd Persian invasion of Greece eventually led to the formation
of the Delian League in 478 BC.
The members of the military alliance now known as the Delian League spanned throughout the
islands of the Aegean Sea and western Anatolia, but was effectively led by Athens.
Members were expected to swear to hold the same common allies and enemies as the rest
of the group, and also pay a tribute in gold, ships, or grain to maintain the naval fleet.
The group initially met to discuss matters in the sacred island of Delos-- where the
group gets its modern name, and where the tributes were stored-- at least until 454
BC when the treasury was moved to Athens, in light of a failed expedition to aid an
anti-Persian prince in Egypt.
The League had already started to look like a kind of Athenian Empire by the breakout
of the First Peloponnesian War in 460 BC, followed by a short-lived peace and numerous
revolts.
These revolts lead up to the Second Peloponnesian War in 431-404 BC, between the Athenian-led
Delian League and the much longer-lived Spartan-led Peloponnesian League, ultimately ending in
the collapse of the Delian League.
We should perhaps also mention that only 31 of the Greek city states actually fought the
Persians, with most staying neutral and some even siding with the Persians.
Honestly, HBO, if you need something to keep you afloat now that Game of Thrones has ended,
make something about all this!
On a closing note, this whole setting up independent city states instead of building an empire
thing was not something unique to the Greeks, nor were they even the first to do so.
The Phoenicians also functioned somewhat similarly to the Greeks, as their civilization consisted
of four large city-states in Lebanon who set up colonies and trading posts all throughout
the Mediterranean.
In fact, most of the cities of ancient Mesopotamia were city-states as well, and this can make
sense since maintaining an empire can be a lot more expensive than just maintaining trade
and defense agreements with allies… who you can also demand tribute from.
This may or may not also explain the slow rise of a civilization virtually synonymous
to us with huge empires, and yet which spent its first 400 years as just another lowly
Latin city-state…
Rome.