Perhaps the greatest problem in the study of the Greek poleis has been the way it has been perceived and treated as a solitary entity. No definition or study of the Greek polis has yet attempted to incorporate the fact that every historical Greek polis was part of a system of interactions between poleis, ethnê, koina and non-Greek communities and polities. The historical institutional environment of the Greek poleis has usually been discarded by recourse to two complementary strategies. The one is the well-known Occidentalist practice of evolutionism: different forms of polities are classified as steps in the evolutionary ladder, with ‘archaic’ forms of ethnê co-existing with progressive classical poleis and ‘old-fashioned’ Greek poleis co-existing with ‘modern’ Hellenistic kingdoms and koina. At the same time, the other Occidentalist discourse on the origins and history of the West creates a dichotomy between a Greece of the polis and an Orient, each with its own separate history, although they might from time to time interact in the well-known billiard game. One of the most malignant results of these approaches is the abandonment of political history to the most traditionalist histoire évènementielle. The static, evolutionist and reified definitions of the polis leave little space for a processual and theoretical approach to Greek political and military history.

Our aim here is to overcome these well-entrenched practices and view Greek poleis as part of a système-monde of polities in the wider context of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.

It has been a commonplace that societies, states and cultures are the units of analysis that historians have to use. I will restrict myself to the treatment of the notion of society in this context. Since the nineteenth century, it has been accepted wisdom that societies are distinct entities with their own rules, laws and borders, and they are the units of analysis that historians use. One could study the relations or interactions between different societies, but one still studies relations and interactions between distinct and definable entities. Is this view justified? I believe not, and in fact it has had a very pernicious influence on the study of Greek history. We hear about the contrast between aristocracy and the polis; between polis and the ethnos; between the citizen-hoplite and the mercenary; between Greece and the East. These distinctions emanate from a static and internalist view of society. I want then to pose two distinct yet interrelated questions: can we speak of the polis as a kind of society? And is the polis an adequate framework for the analysis of the social history of ancient Greek communities?

What is ancient Greek society then? Let us accept for a moment the usual view that a society is coterminous with the boundaries of a polity. What is Athenian society? Is it the society of the Athenian polis? There are reasons to doubt it.

Until now this work has pursued three goals. The first was to show how the dominant approach to the study of Greek history emerged, how the polis emerged as the key organising principle, what other alternative approaches have been sidelined and how wider discursive issues fundamentally shaped the course of scholarship on Greek history. Following this, I attempted to look back at how ancient Greeks discoursed about their poleis, paying particular attention to the various Aristotelian conceptualisations of the polis, and arguing that their analytical value is still relevant for modern historians. Finally, I have presented a critique of the current orthodoxy on the study of Greek polis: an orthodoxy that views the Greek polis as a unitary and solitary entity, to be juxtaposed to other similar entities. I pursued this critique in two case studies: the opposition of Greek polis to Oriental despotism; and the opposition of the Greek polis as consumer city versus the medieval/early modern European producer city.

The question has probably long arrived at the reader's mind: if the criticism has been successful, what is there to substitute those approaches criticised? How can we write Greek history from an alternative approach? How can Greek history be integrated with the history of the Near East and the wider Mediterranean? It is indeed legitimate to expect a positive example of what such a history would look like. But the reader, who expects to find in the following pages an alternative narrative of Greek history, will be utterly disappointed.

This final chapter will serve as an answer to the question that many readers might wish to ask. This book has tried to show how we came to study Greek history in a Eurocentric manner; it has also tried to show why this way of studying Greek history is misleading and problematic; it has finally attempted to provide a scaffolding of what concepts we need in order to construct such an alternative history. The question now is: how do you envisage writing such a history? It is all very well arguing that we need to avoid an account centred on the polis, which usually turns out to be Athenocentric history; but given our type of evidence, what else can we do? It is all very well arguing that we need to go beyond Hellenocentric accounts; but, given the evidence surviving, how can we introduce, for example, the Phoenicians in our accounts, since none of their records has survived? It is all very well arguing that we need a story with many levels and many durations of historical time, instead of teleological and unidimensional accounts; but how is it actually possible to write such a narrative? It is all very well showing the fallacies of Eurocentric master narratives; but can we construct any other kind of master narrative, or should we simply be content with a non-Eurocentric ‘histoire en miettes’?

The Aristotelian treatment of the polis has been sketched above. It is now time to put a number of questions and arrive at a number of conclusions that will provide our guidelines for the rest of this study. The problem with the modern scholarship on the polis is that it has discarded the binary use of the term by the Greeks, in order to arrive at a single, ‘essentialist’ or ideal-type definition of the polis. In doing this, it has been forced to disregard most of the ancient uses of the term to describe particular historical communities, because those uses do not fit with what the polis ‘ought to be’, according to the preferred definition; on the other hand, the nature of the political discourse of the ancient Greeks on the polis has often been misrepresented and its main insights ignored. Accordingly, our task is to argue for a novel study of the Greek poleis by paying new attention to both the Greek contexts of using the term. In this final chapter of the first part I try to abstract some basic concepts, models and insights from the political discourse of the Greeks. These basic concepts and models will be used in the coming chapters, in order to review and think again about the vast number of different historical Greek poleis.

We can now move to see how the concept of the polis has functioned in discussions of ancient economic history. The debate on the polis as a consumer city is an offshoot of an old discourse. It is based on a certain reading of the history of medieval and modern Europe, and the origins of capitalism and modernity. The central desideratum of this discourse is to explain how Europe moved towards modernity, how capitalism emerged and why previous eras and civilisations, or contemporary non-European ones, failed to move towards modernity and capitalism. There have been of course many answers to these questions; but one that became particularly influential was the idea that it was the medieval European city and its urban classes that opened the path to capitalism and modernity. In this approach, the medieval city, separated from the feudal countryside, as ‘a non-feudal island in a feudal sea’, composed mainly of merchants and artisans, fostered the expansion of trade and manufacture, revolutionised the stagnant countryside, and ultimately led to capitalism and modernity. The work of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne in the early decades of the twentieth century gave particular prominence to such ideas. The debate has been going on since then, but, as we will later see, this way of looking at the issue, and the viewing of the medieval city as the answer to the question, have been largely discarded.

As we have already discussed, the polis has functioned as a boundary mark to separate the history of the Greek communities from those of the Near East. This was accomplished through the construction of a contrast between the Greek polis as a community of citizens and Oriental despotism. This contrast is well entrenched in modern scholarship and will be challenged in this chapter, in an attempt to show that the juxtaposition misconstrues what it is to be compared and completely misrepresents the Near Eastern realities. There is then a clear need to reconsider this old dichotomy. Do we have any predecessors in our task?

There has already been some promising work, trying to overcome Orientalist dichotomies, but it has been mainly concerned with cultural and religious history; social, economic and political history has only recently begun to benefit from such a novel approach and still to a limited extent. Moreover, this kind of work has a certain limit. It argues for Oriental influences in ancient Greek culture and religion; it does not challenge directly the meaning of the two juxtaposed entities, and it does not attempt to write a ‘connected history’. I am trying to do something more challenging, yet still limited: my aim is a change of perspective. Instead of being the self-referent ancestor of the West, Greek history can be viewed within the changing history of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a temporal framework for the study of Greek history; it will serve as an accompaniment to the analytical and spatial frameworks that have been presented in previous chapters. We have seen how Eurocentrism has shaped the construction of the temporalities within which Greek history has been studied in the last two centuries. Chapter 5 aimed to show that the temporality that juxtaposes antiquity and modernity, or sees antiquity only through the prism of the emergence of modernity, is deeply problematic and misleading. In what follows, I explore a variety of different temporal frameworks for the study of Greek history.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF EUROCENTRIST TEMPORALITIES

The construction of Greek history as a field within a Eurocentric perspective had a double effect. On the one hand, the incorporation of Greek history within a Eurocentric metanarrative necessitated the construction of Greek history as an entity with beginning, acme and end; it needed a homogenised national narrative; on the other hand, Greek history existed as an entity only from the perspective of how it functioned as a stage in the evolution of the West.

I will deal with this second issue first. We can call this perspective the tunnel vision of time. It is the idea that there is a sort of linear trajectory in history, which moves ultimately to modernity.

I have chosen the title of this book, Unthinking the Greek polis, to indicate that it is an attempt to look back, question and deconstruct the various discourses that underlie the modern study of the Greek polis. Today the polis is certainly the organising principle of the study of ancient Greek history. Every study of the political, economic, social, cultural and religious life of the ancient Greek world has to engage seriously with this concept. It has come to look as if it is perfectly natural to analyse Greek history within such a framework. But in fact, instead of being the natural, or the most plausible, way of studying Greek history, the polis approach is a relatively recent one, being the product of specific decisions and methodologies within larger discursive arguments.

The Greek word polis has a very ancient pedigree. It is thought to be an Indo-European word denoting the sense of ‘stronghold’. But it is its widespread and all-encompassing use by the ancient Greeks of the first millennium bce that has given it an importance transcending its linguistic meaning. Nevertheless, it is only since the middle of the nineteenth century with the publication of works such as those of Burckhardt and Fustel that the word polis has started to attract the attention of modern scholars, and has become part of Western European discourses and literature.

The purpose of the following two chapters is to review and criticise a particular way of approaching ancient history, and history in general. I want to criticise the approach that sees the Greek polis as an entity, and history as a succession or juxtaposition of entities, variously called the West, Greece, Rome, the Orient, antiquity, etc. This will be attempted in a number of case studies. They attempt to criticise some deeply entrenched postulates of social theory and history writing. Charles Tilly has called them ‘the pernicious postulates of twentieth century social thought’, and I reproduce below some that I deem relevant:

The following chapters attempt to show that all these postulates have indeed pernicious results. Societies are not entities with clear and distinct boundaries. This image results in the dichotomy between internal structure and external influence, leaving perennially unresolved problems. Instead, I will argue that we need to view societies as always parts of wider systems: this will allow us to resolve the dichotomy between internal and external.

This work is a study of history, and ‘all of history is contemporary history’. Which, then, are the contemporary issues that influence the perception and articulation of this study? Our era is characterised by the exasperating contradictions of the ideology that one could call ‘Occidentalism’. Occidentalism is the ideology that there exist clearly bounded entities in world history, such as the West, the Orient and the primitives, and that these metaphysical entities have a genealogy (or rather only the Occident has a true genealogy); that there is a pattern in human history, which leads to the evolution of the modern West, which is the natural path of history, while the history of the Rest of the world is a story of aberrations that have to be explained; that the whole world is actually following the lead of the West and one day it will manage to assimilate; that the conceptual tools and the disciplines created by the West are in some way the natural way to organise experience and analyse reality, and that the reality of the past, and the present outside the West, ought to be explicable in these Western terms.

These are not simply academic arguments; they have a real, deadly impact in the world around us.

After our discussion of whether the polis should be treated as the sole unit of analysis for Greek history, it is time to attempt to define alternative units of analysis and research tools. In this section we are going to look at the spatial side of Greek poleis. Unfortunately, the location of Greek poleis within space has been one of the most neglected sides of the study of Greek history. The most characteristic index of this attitude is the habit of depicting Greek poleis as simple dots on the map, without showing the extent of their territories. I must be obviously mistaken, and yet the only map I can locate that attempts to portray Greek communities as territorial entities is in the publication of Müller's Die Dorier in 1824. In the words of Archibald, ‘the usual representation of historical communities as dots in a white void reinforces the static impression of isolated, nucleated oases’.

Another very common problem with the use of maps in the study of Greek history is the misleading depiction of poleis territories. The case of Athens is characteristic: all maps in general works of Greek history, and most even in specialised studies, depict only Attica as the territory of the Athenian polis. I know no map of the territory of the polis of the Athenians which attempts to depict the overseas settlements of the Athenian polis (cleruchies and other dependent communities).

The use of Olympiads and Olympic stadion victors to reckon time resulted in the creation of a modified version of the standard catalog of Olympic victors. This modified victor catalog, which is here called a chronographic catalog of Olympic victors, listed only the names of stadion winners. Comments on periodonikai and on athletes who won multiple victories at a single Olympiad, both of which were found in standard catalogs, were carried over, but the names of victors in events other than the stadion were omitted because they lacked chronographic significance. This stripped down catalog was enriched with a considerable amount of information that was exhibited in separate narrative segments in Olympionikon anagraphai. Brief notes about the introduction of new events into the Olympic program, about athletes who won multiple victories over multiple Olympiads, and about the exploits of famous athletes were added to the entries for the appropriate Olympiads. Other, purely chronographic information, particularly key synchronizations among various systems of dating, was also added. These catalogs were in at least some cases prefaced by a short account of the history of the Olympics.

The interdependent chronographic catalogs of Olympic victors found in the work of Sextus Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and Panodoros all began with the first Olympiad. As there is some evidence that the victor catalogs in the other known Olympiad chronographies also began with the first Olympiad, it is probably safe to assume that all chronographic catalogs began, as it were, in the beginning.