Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity

by John Ma

A definitive new history of the origins, evolution, and scope of the ancient Greek city-state

The Greek polis, or city-state, was a resilient and adaptable political institution founded on the principles of citizenship, freedom, and equality. Emerging around 650 BCE and enduring to 350 CE, it offered a means for collaboration among fellow city-states and social bargaining between a community and its elites—but at what cost? Polis proposes a panoramic account of the ancient Greek city-state, its diverse forms, and enduring characteristics over the span of a millennium.

In this landmark book, John Ma provides a new history of the polis, charting its spread and development into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa and from the Near East to Italy. He explores its remarkable achievements as a political form offering community, autonomy, prosperity, public goods, and spaces of social justice for its members. He also reminds us that behind the successes of civic ideology and institutions lie entanglements with domination, empire, and enslavement. Ma’s sweeping and multifaceted narrative draws widely on a rich store of historical evidence while weighing in on lively scholarly debates and offering new readings of Aristotle as the great theoretician of the polis.

A monumental work of scholarship, Polis transforms our understanding of antiquity while challenging us to grapple with the moral legacy of an idea whose very success centered on the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Greece, Ancient History, Ancient, Politics

720 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 4, 2024

About the author

A specialist in the history of the ancient Greek world and its broader context (including the ancient near-east), John Ma is Professor of Classics at Columbia University, where he has taught since 2015. Before taking up his post at Columbia Ma worked at Corpus Christi College and the Faculty of Classics at Oxford for fifteen years. Before that, he worked in the Classics Department at Princeton (during which period he lived in New York). He received a B.A. (Literae Humaniores) and D.Phil. (Ancient History) from Oxford University.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course, this is a rather specialized book, focusing on the unique political and cultural form of government that Ancient Greece established: the polis. A translation as city-state is certainly not wrong, but it truly does not do justice to the specificity of the Greek poleis. Through a very extensive and in-depth sketch of the evolution of the polis, John Ma (Prof. Columbia University, US) attempts to highlight this specificity. For me, his merit lies primarily in the fact that he also fully focuses on the period after the "Golden" 5th century BCE, even making the surprising observation that the true heyday of the Greek polis, as a form of government, only came after 300 BCE, thus during the Hellenistic period. As mentioned, this is a specialized book, very in-depth and academically conceived, and also containing a fair amount of political jargon. But John Ma's work is so thorough that I am certain this book will set the standard in studies of ancient Greece for years to come. I elaborate on a few aspects in more detail in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Sense of History]

Athens in the 5th century BCE as the cradle of our present democracy—I know, it's long since it has been "debunked" as a cliché. But something always lingers of past views, even for me, who had already read something about this period. For instance, I was still convinced that the Greek city-state, the famed 'polis', almost by definition equated to democratic government. Or that after the 5th century BCE, and certainly after the mid-4th century BCE, those early democratic experiments were completely over.

Classical historian John Ma (Columbia University) has definitively freed me from those delusions. His meticulous research on the development of the Greek poleis shows that this form of government existed in many forms, especially in its early stages. Inclusive and exclusive oriented poleis coexisted, and many poleis went through various stages of openness and closedness, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (Athens itself is a striking example). I was really enchanted by his in-depth analysis of the endlessly complex phase (some 2 centuries) of experimenting with this state form. Luckily, he avoids the teleological trap, respecting the rules of systems theory.

But Ma's great merit is that he demonstrates that during the 4th century BCE (thus after that famous Golden Century), a striking convergence toward more democratic governments occurred, of course also with ups and downs. And that the polis form itself, with its emphasis on sovereignty and the common/public good, truly flourished between 300 and 150 BCE, thus under the Hellenistic, seemingly more despotic, regimes! As he himself puts it: “It might be tempting to interpret the Classical period as the story of a mounting crisis of an exhausted polis world, culminating in the end of Greek freedom when the Macedonian kings Philippos II and Alexandros III simplified the mess of politics by defeating most polis actors. (…) Yet this outcome, unexpectedly, would also offer dynamic new possibilities for the world of poleis because of the emergence of a multipolar, multiscalar world system and because the Greek culture of the poleis, by a historical accident, was promoted to a hegemonic status as the common idiom of the big power players in this system. In the long run, the polis form (in its discourses, institutions, and materialities) would spread across the eastern Mediterranean, overlaying and then displacing other cultures.”

According to Ma, the playing field for the Greek poleis only became smaller under the Romans (ca 150 BCE), even though a kind of Indian Summer followed. Only from 86 BCE onward (after the Mithradatic Wars) did Roman forbearance end. But even under the Roman umbrella, a lot of diversity continued to exist, an eye-opener indicating that the harsh Roman reputation wasn't so monolithic as generally assumed.

I'm running out of superlatives to praise this work: it's thorough, in-depth, up-to-date, attentive to the broader context, and nuanced where the sources don't provide complete clarity. If only all academic work were like this! Granted, Ma's focus is sometimes very political, and therefore certainly not for everyone. And there certainly are points of criticism to be made. For example, I found his inclusive-exclusive framework rather simplistic, especially considering that the democratic regime of Athens, which he characterized as inclusive, in practice was very restrictive: only wealthy male citizens could participate (of course, Ma means inclusive towards outsiders). But this book deserves every praise and, as many academic reviews point out, can certainly be called a "landmark".

[History Today]

My book of the year is John Ma’s Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (Princeton), a meticulously researched history of the peculiar political phenomenon of the autonomous city state, ruled by an elite class of peers who shared resources to achieve common goals. Ma’s magnum opus offers a persuasive account of how the polis came to be, and the book does well to dwell on its liberatory political possibilities without losing sight of the fact the polis was also ‘a patriarchy, an enslavement society, a nativist organization, and a polity haunted by the model of an urban aristocracy’. An extraordinary achievement.

Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Mirela Ivanova is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield and author of Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press)

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to read, there is a lot of information ranging all over the eastern Mediterranean and the prose is dense and academic. But it is worth pushing through for the brilliant political history.

The main thesis of the book is that the polis was a unit of governance that ran from the Homeric Age to Late Antiquity. Furthermore, these city-states began with diverse political structures that converged into democracies during the Hellenistic era. Ma bases his history on extensive evidence from sources such as poetry, inscriptions, oratory, and textural artifacts.

For me, the most interesting observation is the continuity of the poleis across this time span.

[Frizzo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ich habe nach 200 Seiten aufgegeben, nicht weil ich es nicht interessant gefunden hätte, sondern weil es sprachlich einfach eine Zumutung war; man wartet gefühlt mehrere Seiten auf ein Verb.

[Daniel]

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[Chris Jaffe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to give this book one star, and I feel I ought to give it more than two stars. You know what this is? This is the sort of book you read in grad school because it's Important and has Pertinent Information and Arguments for you to absorb. You know it must have that stuff because the thing is such an insufferable jargon-laden shitshow to read that there's no way on earth anyone would ever actually put themselves through this unless it had all that stuff. (And, of course, if you're really a grad student, you know better than to read for enjoyment, silly!)

Yeah, well, I got my fucking graduate degree already thank you very much. Here's a sample of what the book reads like - here's the first sentence of the second paragraph from page 155 of the hardcover edition of this book:

"The pattern can stand in for the main development that I will describe and explore from a variety of angles in this chapter: the generalization of the internally inclusive peer polity as the outcome of the interaction of a world of city-states, as a sort of collective experiment on a broad geographical scale, which is that of the geography of the polis (from Sicily to the Levant, from the Black Sea to Egypt) and over several centuries."

To be fair, it isn't really that heavy into jargon, but it's a confusing, hard-to-read gobbilty-goog of tangents referring to so many things and -- the entire damn book reads like that. And it's over 500 pages. In small font. At least academics know to make their topic sentences fairly intelligable for those just skimming. This book is an actively unpleasant experience.

So what's in it? He looks at the polis from the earliest days until into and beyond Roman times. A key feature of a polis is it's political nature, automony (I think; it was hard for me to retain much from this work).

In the 1200 BCE Greek "Dark Ages" clusters emerged. These places develop shrines which sometimes even predate settlement. By 750 BCE, population was up and oversaeas links as well. Elite displays of power occurred. It's the era of Homer and Hesoid, with a ruler elite, but also an urban sense of community. The first known reference to a polis comes from 650 BCE. It involved the power of a community to regulate its own affairs. There were institutions and offices. People were in tribes. War united them. They built monumental temples.

From 600-450 BCE, polises developed more complex laws and more taxes. The concept of citizenship was creted. Elite competition increased. Democracy began to emerge, but some places went to oligarchy. From 350-280 BCE, we saw the fall of the hegemony of the polis. There's more oligary and more democracy internal autonomy. Ma calls this the great convergence where the polises deal with each other more or less as equal peers with more similar internal frameworks than ever before, partially due to having higher powers over all of them.

He calls the 2nd century BCE the "Indian Summer" of the polis. (Huh. Didn't expect an academic to still use that term). They try to maintain themselves with Rome on the rise, but then they were integrated into the world of Rome. They become provinces and subjects of Rome. Some had more elite-built monuments, others had more assemblies, and others had more direct Roman control. There were polises outside Greece in the east as well.

The narrative, as it were, ends around page 400. Then Ma gives us another hundred-fucking-fifty pages pontificating on the nature of the polis. He disagrees with some theory Aristotle had on the polis. They were places of civic trust. They were also places with limits on membership to women, slaves, and foreigners. He makes a comparison to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

I skimmed it, and skimmed less and less as I went along.

Ugh.