The Rise of the Ancient Greek City-State Culture

Modern historians are still in conflict over the chronology of the Greek city-states. Can the polis be traced back to the Mycenean Age? Or did it arise in the Geometric period? And if one settles for the latter view, one still has to take a position about whether it began as early as c.900 bc or as late as 700. No consensus has yet been reached as to where and when the earliest poleis are to be found; and there is even less agreement still as to when the later ones died out. In what follows I shall argue for the now widespread opinion that the Greek polis was not destroyed by the Macedonians at the end of the Classical period but continued as the leading form of state and society all through the Hellenistic Age and through most of the Roman Imperial period. The polis died out only in late antiquity after a period of decline of several hundred years: its disappearance was gradual and imperceptible, as had been its arrival on the scene more than 1,000 years earlier.

Aesthetics · Ancient Greek · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Chronology · Period (music) · State (computer science) · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History