When Did the Polis (City State) Rise ?

[akritas]

Polis is the ancient Greek word for ‘city’, ‘state’ and the combination of city and state, the ‘city-state’. It has often, quite rightly, been said that the polis, as a form of state and society, was the basis of the whole of Greek civilisation; and the implication of that is that one can only understand Greek civilisation if one understands the form of the society the Greeks lived under the polis.

However, this illuminating truth is, regrettably, seldom followed up by a description of what a polis actually is (or rather was, for the form of city-state culture that dominated Greece in antiquity no longer exists anywhere in the world). It is to-day a known and undisputed fact that the Polis was not only the characteristic and historically important type of Greek State, but that as a religious and political community it was for centuries the foundation and the support of Greek culture. But so far a true' history of the Polis has not been written!

A reason for this may be that the Polis stands as the abstract representative of an enormous number of concrete independent States widely differing in form and development and known to us through traditions widely differing in quality. We must try, and the attempt has already been made, to define the main lines of this historical phenomenon and its evolution, and before all else to obtain a clearer view of the beginning, climax, and end of this evolution in time and manner.

In the Suppliants, composed before 480, perhaps as early as 490, Aeschylus depicts the Polis as the obvious State-form of mythical Argos,not only as the scene and background, but as the great power from which all law springs.