The Development Of The Polis In Archaic Greece

Beyond the historical development of the Greek polis, the authors ask questions about the civic institutions of ancient Greece as a whole, and their relationships to each other.

The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy presents a series of essays that trace the Greeks’ path to democracy and examine the connection between the Greek polis as a citizen state and democracy as well as the interaction between democracy and various forms of cultural expression from a comparative historical perspective and with special attention to the place of Greek democracy in political thought and debates about democracy throughout the centuries. Presents an original combination of a close synchronic and long diachronic examination of the Greek polis - city-states that gave rise to the first democratic system of government Offers a detailed study of the close interactionbetween democracy, society, and the arts in ancient Greece Places the invention of democracy in fifth-century bce Athens both in its broad social and cultural context and in the context of the re-emergence of democracy in the modern world Reveals the role Greek democracy played in the political and intellectual traditions that shaped modern democracy, and in the debates about democracy in modern social, political, and philosophical thought Written collaboratively by an international team of leading scholars in classics, ancient history, sociology, and political science

Contains 35 articles devoted to different aspects of the Greek polis and is intended not only as a present for Mogens Herman Hansen on his sixtieth birthday, but also as a way of thanking him for his significant contributions to the field of Greek history over the past three decades.

During the three centuries from 800 to 500 B.C., the Greek world evolved from a primitive society--both culturally and economically--to one whose artistic products dominated all Mediterranean markets, supported by a wide overseas trade. In the following two centuries came the literary, philosophical, and artistic masterpieces of the classic area. Vital to this advance was the development of the polis, a collective institution in which citizens had rights as well as duties under the rule of law, a system hitherto unknown in human history. In this study, the first systematic exploration of the forces that created the political framework of Greek civilization, Chester Starr shows how the Greeks emerged form a Homeric world of individuals to the polis of 500 B.C. The age-old conflict between the self-serving demands of human beings and the less vocally-expressed needs of the community serves as the backbone of Starr's interdisciplinary analysis of the rise of the polis.

Polis, in plural poleis, is the word the ancient Greeks used to describe their principal type of state and community and the most common of all nouns in ancient Greek. In Archaic and Classical sources there are over 11,000 attestations of the word, and they show that it was used in two different senses: (1) town (sometimes including the hinterland) and (2) state (sometimes including the territory). Often it carries both senses simultaneously and denotes both the state and its urban centre. The Copenhagen Polis Centre (1993-2005) conducted a number of investigations into the use and meanings of the term polis in all Archaic and Classical sources to find out what the Greeks thought a polis was. The present volume is a thoroughly revised and updated comprehensive publication of all these studies, to which four new studies have been added. They show that the two different meanings of the word polis are connected through their reference: with very few exceptions every polis town was the urban centre of a polis state, and conversely: virtually every polis state had an urban centre called a polis in the sense of town.

A fourth collection of Papers from the Copenhagen Polis Centre, a collective whose "ulimate aim is to present a new analysis of the Archaic and Classical Greek polis ", through various wide-ranging and thematically specific investigations. This volume and the others in the series are released in advance of the publication of a general synthesis of findings, hence the thematic incoherence of the titles contained herein: Polis as the Generic Term for State, Hekataios' Use of the Word Polis in His Periegesis , and A Typology of Dependent Poleis (Mogens Herman Hansen) ; A Survey of the Major Urban Settlements in the Kimmerian Bosphoros (With a Discussion of Their Status as Poleis ) (Gocha R. Tsetskhladze) ; Emporion . A Study of the Use and Meaning of the Term in the Archaic and Classical Periods (Mogens Herman Hansen) ; Colonies and Ports-of-Tradee on the Northern Shores of the Black Sea: Borysthenes, Kremnoi and the "Other Pontic Emporia in Herodotos (John Hind) ; Some Problems in Polis Identification in the Chalkidic Peninsula (Pernille Flensted-Jensen) ; Triphylia . An Experiment in Ethnic Construction adn Political Organisation (Thomas Heine Nielsen) ; The Polis of Asea. A Case-Study of How Archaeology Can expand Our Knowlege of the History of a Polis (Jeanette Fors�n and Bj�rn Fors�n) .

A series of new Papers from the Copenhagen Polis Centre. Among other things, these important papers discuss the role and function of theatres in the Greek world, the nature of early Cretan laws, how Greeks and indigenous peoples interacted on Sicily and in Magna Graecia, and whether or not the modern concept of Aethe stateless societyae applies to the ancient Greek polis. Contents: Mogens Herman Hansen: The Game Called Polis Mogens Herman Hansen: Was the Polis a State or a Stateless Society? Thomas Heine Nielsen: Phrourion. A Note on the Term in Classical Sources and in Diodorus Siculus Rune Frederiksen: The Greek Theatre. A Typical Building in the Urban Centre of the Polis? Tobias Fischer-Hansen: Reflections on Native Settlements in the Dominions of Gela and Akragas - as Seen from the Perspective of the Copenhagen Polis Centre Paula Perlman: Gortyn. The First Seven Hundred Years. Part II. The Laws from the Temple of Apollo Pythios James Roy: The Pattern of Settlement in Pisatis: the aeEight PoleisAe James Roy: The Synoikism of Elis Index of Sources (Literary Texts, Inscriptions and Papyri) General Index