In much of the ancient world a city’s emblem was its walls. ‘O Ur-shanabi,’ proclaims the hero in the last lines of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, ‘climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!’ Realising he cannot escape death, Gilgamesh takes comfort knowing the city walls of Uruk will be his legacy. The Old Testament Book of Nehemiah charts the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s city walls more than a century after their destruction by conquest. The account lists every section and who worked there: ‘Joiada son of Paseah (…) Meshullam son of Besodeiah (…) Melatiah of Gibeon and Jadon of Meronoth’. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus writes of how Deioces, the first Medic King, rose to power and built the city of Ecbatana whose seven walls were each a different colour.
It was early, and perhaps from the very start, that walls rose beyond the vulgar purpose of protecting inhabitants and wealth. The world-historian Fernand Braudel wrote that ‘Every town is and wants to be a world apart’. Walls stood for identity, glory, strength. It was an astounding and exceptional feature to contemporaries of ancient Sparta that the city was unwalled. Ancient Greek tradition starts with Homer’s Iliad, which foretells the destruction of the great walls of Troy. Gods built them. For ten years they withstood the army of Greeks, but the wooden horse was their downfall. Today in Greece the Bronze Age fortresses of Mycenae and Tyrins can be found near the Southern cities of Argos and Nafplio. During the second century CE Pausanias, the travel-writer, quoted a belief that their walls were built by the Cyclopes. Of their apogee (roughly 1600-1000BCE) virtually no record survives. The Homeric poems were probably set during this period but composed later. Archaeologists can tell a shadowy sort of tale: fires, burials, reconstructions. But the walls have long outlived what they preserved.
‘Men are the city, not empty walls or ships,’ said Nikias, an Athenian general of the fifth century BCE, to the beleaguered army at Syracuse. The Athenians, already at war with Sparta, had voted to send a huge force to conquer Sicily. The campaign was a disaster, fatal for the soldiers, but not the city, which survived defeat against expectations. From the so-called Archaic period (roughly 700-500BCE) to the fall of Rome (476CE), Greece had what scholars call a city-state culture. About 850 Greek cities, or poleis (singular polis), are known to have existed at the time of Nikias’s speech. Poleis could be anything from tiny settlements such as Pylos and Amorgos to great powers like Thebes and Rhodes. Some were like warrior-cults (Sparta, Crete), others large merchant communities (Corinth, Corcyra), others the custodians of sacred sites (Elis, Delphi, Delos).
Each polis had its own name, history and laws or institutions; all were run by a permutation of their citizen-men. The rise of the city as a political community is sometimes linked with developments in war during the seventh century BCE. Instead of a morass of individual fighters, armies became organised into units that fought collectively and carried out disciplined manoeuvres. The extent of the change is controversial. But an army so structured depends on solidarity more than bursts of heroism, and collective rather than individual training. The political institution of the polis may have arisen first as a warrior collective seeking to subjugate other cities and to secure and perpetuate itself. As one historian has written, ‘to be a man was to be a hoplite’ – to be a hoplite (citizen-soldier) was to rule, protect, and conquer. The denial of autonomy to women in the Greek city was related to their absence from the field of war. In poetry some men dreamed of a world where they could bear their own children. As they could not, women were expected to have male offspring who in turn could grow up to debate and fight. Euripides’s Medea said, ‘I would rather stand behind a shield in three battles than give birth to a single child.’
If these were its origins, the polis outgrew and forgot them to some extent. The fifth-century BCE was full of debates about what the city was and how it had begun. The official belief in many places, including Athens, was that their ancestors had sprung out of the earth in that spot. Often it was claimed the city’s laws had been dictated by one Moses-like (but not divinely ordained) genius such as Solon of Athens or Lycurgus of Sparta. The lawgiver was a late philosophical contrivance. But regimes of law differed markedly. Ancient theorists agreed that broadly stated there were three forms of government possible, three distributions of power: monarchy or tyranny (one-man rule), oligarchy (rule of a few men, sometimes thousands), and democracy (assemblies of the entire male-citizen population). The most reliable and long-lasting civic arrangements, it was felt, incorporated something of all three: most famously Sparta, Chios, and Crete. The integration of all these systems, argued the historian Polybius in the second century BCE, was what distinguished Rome and made it strong. But in Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE they clashed with violence. Tyrants rose and fell by revolution or intrigue. Rich and poor fought to destroy each other. What today we describe as civil war the Greeks called stasis. They considered it a force which is always there, even in peacetime, an impulse that must continually be held in check. The poets of this era, renowned advice-givers, were unanimous: avoid stasis, they said; be unified.
The notional oneness of the ancient Greek city (one people, one lawgiver, one place) has been compared with, and held responsible for, the emergence of systematic philosophy during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Like the city, these thinkers sought to show that the cosmos in its abundant variety was nonetheless a coherent, singular phenomenon. Some philosophers tried to reduce everything to one element or principle: Thales was supposed to have claimed the world is water, Heraclitus fire. Anaximander probably thought the world was a single process: give, take, and recompense according to the rule of time. Parmenides believed there was only one transcendent, limitless, eternal Being, the rest illusory. It was Plato whose thought placed cosmic and civic oneness beyond anything that was real and tangible, making them ideas only. Aristotle denied even this: for him every polis was characterised by multiplicity, not oneness, and governance meant the task of ordering its respective parts. But even Aristotle retained enough of his predecessors’ monism to imagine and theorise the world as held by an uncreated God.
Like capitalism in modern times, every aspect of Greek antiquity was conditioned by the socio-political form of the polis, even ones which at first glance seem beyond its scope. The question of where to begin is hard and daunting. In modern scholarship, a watershed was the decade-long research programme of the Copenhagen Polis Centre (1993-2003). Their aim was avowedly comparative and empirical: rather than seeking to describe as such, they chose to collect and organise all possible information from a breadth of sources. The Centre counted thirty-seven city-state cultures in human history, from the early-modern Union of Utrecht to the Mayan constellations on the Yucatan. One result of their work has been to show the variety of the Greek cities in terms of scale, demography, economy, and society. But they also demonstrated a remarkable unity and interconnectedness of language, culture, religion, and trade. The Greek polis was never singular, they showed, but always part of a network of dependencies, alliances and struggles that made it work. Politically, the Greek cities were not united until they were conquered by Alexander in the third century BCE. But they shared a world-system, a ‘city-state culture’, by which individual poleis were sustained and with which they identified themselves.
In fact, the city-state culture of Greece was more than Greek. It encompassed virtually the entire Mediterranean from end to end, including Massalia or modern-day Marseille and Dioscurias in the Caucasus (both founded in the sixth century BCE). Nor did it decline when conquered, by first Alexander and his successors, then the Romans. The political philosopher Philip Pettit has distinguished between domination and interference. The great powers dominated but may have seldom interfered; they ruled the ancient world, but less than we imagine did they mould it. In later centuries, although the Roman emperor’s cult was worshipped at the civic altars, his word law, the Greek poleis looked to their past officially as well as unofficially, and the day-to-day running of affairs may have been their own. Sometimes they even flourished. The Syrian city of Palmyra for example was an economic and political power for centuries, with a population that counted Jews, Greeks and Romans. A remarkable legacy of Alexander’s conquests and the ensuing cultural exchange was the hybrid genre of Greco-Buddhist sculpture.
Recent work has thus sought to ‘unthink’ the Greek polis, arguing that the system of connections between cities is a more elucidating and authentic object than the polis in its siloed form. John Ma’s Polis (Princeton University Press), which moves against this tendency, is the latest major event in the field: an effort to synthesise a thousand years of history with all the different forms and places there encompassed. The scale of time and place covered is the book’s most impressive feature. But Ma’s interest is in the polis, singular, noun. Its unity, he claims, derives from a common feature: the institutionalisation of a set of laws and practices. He opens with a famous stone inscription from the third century BCE: an oath sworn by the inhabitants of the small island of Hērakleia, promising not to keep goats there and listing all the consequences of transgression. The islanders followed a standard practice of many poleis: after being decided upon and sworn, the oath was set in stone and displayed in a sanctuary, the island’s Shrine of the Mother of Gods, where in the nineteenth century it was found and published by an epigraphist named Jules Delamarre. The inscription suggests a degree of local organisation not unequal to the major cities. But it raises questions too. For example, how many people could have read the words? How would its official language have struck them? And more generally, what was the relation between the city’s political institutions, its daily life, and religion?
Ma brushes past these questions because they cut against the story he wishes to tell about the polis. He describes his model as ‘Aristotelian’, but its real affinities are with a group of ancient historians who aim to study and represent the Greek polis as an ideal and a step towards the supreme pinnacle of human political thought and organisation, the Western liberalism of the United States. The common name for this ideal polis is Athens, the essential academic study Josiah Ober’s Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. But classical Athens was an empire abroad riven by internal conflicts at home; a flawed utopia to say the least. Ma’s innovation is to place the paradigmatic polis not in Athens but throughout Greece during the later third, second and first centuries BCE. The lack of non-inscriptional evidence from this period means that nearly all we can access of these cities are official statements; many cities were incorporated into large monarchies, and others, like Rhodes, claimed to be democracies when they were clearly not. Against such objections, Ma insists repeatedly that his work provides just a single model, one of many possible constructions (‘Of course, the story is too pat’, he concludes at the end of one chapter). But the deeper problem is that his work shares, with its weaknesses, the basis of Ober’s scholarship: an assumption that human societies can be everywhere homogenously divided into a narrow elite and a large mass; an account and definition of the polis as a unique historical achievement where the mass tamed the elite; an emphasis on the democratic polis as its true form, implying that oligarchic or monarchic poleis are somehow defective or inauthentic; an emphasis on official institutions and rule of law, often taking these and their self-justifications at face value; a tendency to discount as incidental religious practices and, above all, the exclusion and domination of women and slaves. Ma leaves this last point to the final chapters, where he strives to dispel ‘a cloud of pessimism’ by contrasting these historical imperfections with the trans-historical reality of the polis as an ideal. He does not seriously consider if these exclusions have much to do with how the polis arose and whether they in fact have something to do with its ideal.
In other words, Ma is a Fukuyamist (and self-consciously deploys Fukuyama’s famous phrase ‘end of history’). After the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama claimed that the question of the ‘final form’, the perfect arrangement of human society, had been answered by the ideal of capitalist liberal democracy, and what remained was only to bring this ideal to fulfilment completely and everywhere. Like Fukuyama, Ma combines an enormous range and grasp of detail with what Derrida called a ‘distressing primitivity’. Both depend on what Derrida called ‘the hypothesis that all that is going badly in the world today [scil. the polis] is but a measure of the gap between an imperial reality and a regulating ideal’, instead of ‘putting into question (…) the very concept of the said ideal’. Ma writes that ‘the history of the polis represents a discovery (and consolidation) of democracy, not the discovery of democracy’. The italicisation is telling, as if the latter does mark a fundamental break in history. By ‘democracy’, in the end, we must be given to understand what functions as an aspiration and a justification of Western political power. Marx, who had a doctorate in ancient Greek philosophy, predicted that Western bourgeois thinkers would come to view pre-Capitalist societies just as the Christian Middle Ages had thought of pagan antiquity. In the modern academy there is a kind of ancient historian who cannot help themselves, like Saint Paul, from standing beneath the Acropolis to declare: I have come to reveal the hidden faith, the one you practised without noticing, because you were lost in superstitions.
It is no coincidence that Ma, a liberal, who believes that history has an end and a direction at least in principle, avoids thinking about the polis in terms of historical systems or forces. He prefers his model, which treats the institutions of the polis as inventions that mark points of progress in a single shared history of humanity, like how some scientists might speak of the discovery of algebra. But the paradox of Ma’s model is that he claims the Greeks, in a way, invented politics at the same time as they developed the first communities in which right prevailed over force; in other words, communities where politics did not exist. In fact, what the institutions of the polis institutionalised, so to speak, as every woman and slave in the city knew, was power. Water does not change substance when it freezes, though it becomes ice; it transforms without losing its integrity. This the Fukuyamist does not recognise, and in modern political philosophy the mistake leads to an equivalent paradox. Western liberalism is best viewed not in eschatological terms as the final form of history, but rather alongside Sovietism and Fascism as a response to the twin historical developments of industrial capitalism and revolution that spread gradually across the world from 1789 to 1968. And perhaps in the twenty-first century it can also be admitted that, no less than the former two, it is vulnerable to its own contradictions. Indeed, there is a sense of foreboding even among the faithful: at the front of Ma’s book a dedication reads, ‘To Fergus Millar, the last Democrat’.
Unfortunately, for all of Ma’s impressive range and depth, the exercise to which this book is dedicated is, like many a work of scholarship in the humanities, the production of official myths. The myth of democracy: cutting across what divides mass and elite, a rule of law based in consensus rather than power, a culmination beyond the force of history. Yet history, as Abraham Lincoln knew, is something we cannot escape. To see power and not be too unsettled or overawed by it is in part what an ancient historian must do. A vast and detailed study of the polis like Ma’s, but with the courage and imagination to conceive the forces that shaped it, would be a major intellectual event.
1/2/2024
Rory O’Sullivan is a writer and researcher finishing a PhD in Ancient Greek philosophy. He lives in Paris.
