Princeton (2024) h/b 736pp £42.00 (ISBN 9780691155388)
With well over 1,000 such settlements scattered from Marseilles in the west to the Crimea in the east, the polis (or city-state) defined classical Greek life. But how did the polis come into being, what were its basic characteristics, and when did the polis system end? These questions are at the heart of this hefty volume, and M.’s answers are occasionally provocative.
The bulk of the work is diachronic. M. takes the reader from the Bronze Age world (when kings in their palaces could countenance public-minded activities such as hydraulic projects); through ‘archaic’ Greece when poleis, emphatically defining their boundaries, unique identity and history, grew out of ‘clustervilles’ e.g. cemeteries replaced scattered burials, communal centres of worship such as stone-built temples first emerged, and popular assemblies—such as the one in Cretan Dreros that in c. 650 BC promulgated a law using the word polis for the first time in a document—into the classical Greek world. This includes what M. calls the ‘hundred years war’ from c. 460 to c. 360 BC, but also the Hellenistic and Imperial Roman Eastern Mediterranean, including even Palmyra, which M. sees as having been set up using the polis model. For, strongly disagreeing with the widespread scholarly notion that the world of the polis ended in the 4th C BC on the battlefields of Leuctra, Mantinea or Chaeronea (or the first century BC at Actium), and despite the fact that underpinning classical polis life was a visceral desire for autonomy, M. prefers to see its structures survive until the late 4th C AD, adapted to suit new realities.
However, while the essence of the polis (including shared values and laws, a common identity, citizen assemblies, councils, and ‘liturgies’, the system by which wealthy citizens supported the community through cash donations, buildings or financial support of public festivals) may have endured historical upheavals, it is questionable, despite M.’s insistence, whether Solon or Demosthenes (say) would have recognised a late Roman town or city as a polis in their sense of the word. ‘Never mind,’ wrote Cicero of the Greek east, ‘at least they think [my italics] they have autonomia’, and even M. is forced to accept that ‘the Roman state, even as it acknowledged the existence of the poleis, pierced the shell of polis integrity, bypassing civic, political mechanisms to tinker on the ground.’ It was only the advent of Christianity, he argues, that truly put an end to the polis, making bishops out of wealthy patrons and getting rid of the citizen class entirely.
As for that citizen class, M.’s most engaging arguments concern its makeup and development, as he considers the commonly opposed models of Sparta with its tiny citizen elite and Athens, where citizenship was more inclusive, and whose model of democracy was generally adopted throughout the Greek-speaking world in the Hellenistic Age (something M. calls the ‘great convergence’). However, it is only in the final five chapters, ‘Making sense of the polis’, that M. addresses those whom the polis tended to exclude (namely, to a greater or lesser extent, women, slaves, foreigners and children), and even here his coverage is considerably less extensive than his discussion over many chapters of the super-elite.
At 554 pages of dense text, this is not a book for the faint-hearted, though its scale does lend it strength, allowing M. to examine many case histories from a multiplicity of poleis large and small, including the island of Herakleia issuing an edict banning the farming of goats, the city of Teos imposing a poll tax thanks to which all citizens had access to a doctor, and a leading Cretan politician receiving a suit of clothing at public expense. Such details bring the text alive, lending meaning to M.’s description of his work as ‘a long love-letter to the discipline of ancient history within and without Classics’.
With notes, an extensive bibliography, a surprisingly concise index, copious black-and-white illustrations and occasionally useful maps, this book will appeal primarily to specialists. The student or general classicist might wish to wait for M.’s thesis to be presented by himself or others in a more easily digestible form, although those who do see the sometimes difficult prose through to the end will find themselves considering not only what it was like to live in the polis of Antiquity but how that experience might compare to life today.
David Stuttard