Fragments
Early Social Foundations of Greek Life
The question as to where and how a nation begins is a difficult one, like all questions about beginnings. It can be said, though, that the social foundations of Greek life — family, honour and property rights — seem already to have existed in the pre-Hellenic period, at the latest when the Greeks and the Graeco-Italians still formed one nation. This social basis need not assume uniformity in this extended nationhood; but it must have been the creation (or the expression) of a primal religion, which assigned a central place to the cult of fathers and ancestors as well as that of hearth and home. It was this cult that held together the family, which we thus have to think of as being at least as much a religious union as a natural one. The cult of ancestry also determined monogamy, which was present in Greek life from the beginning, as is clear both from the formal ceremonies of marriage and from the severe penalties for adultery. Equally, the right of property in land stands in a causal relationship with veneration of the home and of graves. While the Tartars observed property rights only for the home, and the Germanic races made a new division of the land every year, the Graeco-Italians had individual rights in land from the earliest times, not, indeed, for persons, but for families. According to Diodorus (5.68) the hearth taught people housebuilding, and houses were originally separate; there were no party walls. The plot of land contained the family grave, and the plots were inalienable for this reason — not, for instance, merely to secure the ruling caste when victorious invaders divided land.
The right of inheritance was also linked to the law of succession which was determined by the cult of the dead. The son was the usual heir; originally, daughters did not inherit, but to ensure the sacrifices to the dead, legitimate daughters were betrothed to their nearest relative, and adoption was permitted, though not until citizenship of some kind was constituted by the State. The authority of the father must have been very wide-ranging. It seems certain that this authority, as well as the rights of property and inheritance, must have long predated the establishment of the polis, since it is a safe assumption that if the polis had already existed it would have decided these matters differently.
— genos, phratriai, phylai, ethnos
On the other hand, in the historical period the genos, i.e. the clan based on descent, was known only as an old tradition, and no longer existed anywhere in its primitive form. It was still remembered as the consciousness of shared ancestry and in the communal cult of graves, the grave being the only property held in common; but no one in historical times experienced it as an everyday living reality. Even the relationship between the younger branches and the main family line is uncertain, and so is the modification of the clan community through the incorporation of slaves and paid workers. We are quite unable to imagine how clans were related to tribes, and can only hypothesize about this. Questions that remain unanswerable for us are whether families (genos) united into phratriai (brotherhoods), these into phylai, and phylai into ethnic groups (ethnos), or the other way round, with the ethnos as the primary unit dispersing into phylai, phratriai and families; that is, whether it was a case of subdivision or of merging.
— The Phyle and Its Origins
Yet one venerable fragment of antiquity rises up from the political developments and vicissitudes of the Greeks as the jagged peak of an old mountain range towers above later alluvial deposits: the phyle. As often happens, the great changes which overtook the institution and its name have made it hard to understand what it originally was.
The population of the Doric states used to consist of three phylai or tribes: Pamphylians, Dymanes and Hylleis. Pamphylus and Dyman were the sons of King Aigimius and grandsons of Dorus, but Hyllus was the son of Heracles, who once came to the aid of Aigimius in the battle with the Lapiths; this third section must have been the most favoured, since the Heraclids sprang from it and led the Dorians in the celebrated migration in which they founded many states.
In Attica and probably in other Tonian states' there were four phylai Geleontes, Argadeis, Aigicoreis and Hopletes, whose eponymous heroes were the supposed sons of Ion — even if there was some difficulty about extracting a singular form for their names from the plural forms of the phylai-names? Even in antiquity these names were thought indicative of different ways of life: roughly speaking, landowners, craftsmen, shepherds and a knightly aristocracy. But in the historical period, each phyle included aristocrats and ordinary citizens of every kind, while occupations or castes such as those mentioned, if they could be found in Greece at all, could not have been assimilable to equal rights in the State; for the phylai became elective bodies, and under Solon's constitution each group of a hundred members sent a representative to the assembly. The names must have been very ancient, and gradually have lost their meaning — whatever that originally was — until the people, who had used them for so many generations, had so far modified them that they again began to sound as if they had significance in themselves. In Doric usage the same no doubt happened with the name Pamphylians, which we must be careful not to translate as 'mixed population' (cf. 'Alemannic'). Whether, in the early period of tribal life, the phylai were distinguished by where they lived, it is impossible to tell; later, in any case, everyone lived together, and it was enough for individuals to know which phyle they belonged to. The names of the Athenians who fell at Marathon were arranged on the inscribed stone pillars of the great grave-mound according to their phylai, that is the new phylai which Cleisthenes had substituted for the old.
Are we, then, to say that the Dorians were first divided into three phylai and the Ionians into four? Or rather that the first were made up of three clans merging and the second of four? Perhaps it is better to avoid both expressions and recognize that the origin of these forms remains a mystery.
A fiery melting process that we cannot comprehend brought a nation into being, which almost invariably chose this same form in its various states. Perhaps it is easiest to avoid error by borrowing from a mythical formulation: Clotho spins the vital thread of the Dorians from three strands, and that of the lonians from four.
— Some difficulties
We may pass over the later new divisions of the phylai. When, in Attica, Cleisthenes made ten out of the four, it may have represented an urgently needed reform to even things up, possibly because the four old phylai, who were recognized by Solon as basic, had become very unequal in strength during the turbulent century between his time and that of Cleisthenes.
Greek cities founded later reproduced this political form, including those of the diadochoi, and so did those founded by Hadrian with his passion for antiquity, such as Hadrianopolis and Antinoöpolis in Egypt. The various changes that occurred in the meaning of the word phyle, and how even purely regional divisions later came to be given this name, are proper to the study of 'Greek antiquities". Institutions like these are truly Janus-faced; on the one side ancient events and the very beginnings of things, transplanted and preserved by descent, but on the other the basis of representation in states, altered many times and artificially recreated.
Unique Among Other Indo-Europeans
A vigorous life force must have characterized the old Greek tribes more than other Aryans; the fierce vitality the nation later showed might be said to have been foreshadowed in the migrations, settlements and mergings of the old separate tribes, which must often have spent long periods on the move. Records on this subject are complex, confused and hardly sufficient to support any historical exactitude, but they are also extremely abundant.
A wealth of detail is available even on the smallest scale; every tiny population has its legend of migration, while in Germanic history it is only the broad outlines that can be learned. By the seventh century our Alemannic populations seem to have lost all memory of the turbulent past they emerged from; their occupation of Roman soil left not one single trace in popular tradition, and hardly any in history; they were simply there. By contrast, Greek peoples show the strongest consciousness of ancestry and resettlement, always expressed in mythical form.
Personalization in the figures of founding heroes, their flights and new domains, the earnest incorporation of them in the general mythology, their graves and the cults connected with these, are a kind of security for the powerful vitality of the future poleis. But who were the people, within a group, who kept these memories alive amidst their daily labours? As always, they can only have been the bards who sang of the heroic legends. Alongside them, and partly relying on their poetry collected from near and far, a more general genealogical and in fact also ethnographic kind of poem could arise, like the Catalogue of Women of Hesiod, the catalogue of ships in Homer, and similar 'epics'. Among the Germanic peoples, after the migrations, some dynasties such as the Nibelungs and Harelungs are glimpsed in the darkness, but all the rest centres on Dietrich of Bern, and he eludes all attempts to fix him anywhere on German soil. By Greek standards, a gigantic forest of dynasties ought to have flourished in Germany.
The Polis as the Developed and Intensified Tribe
In these migration legends, the particular tribe is seen as free to use any and every means to defend its own existence; the children and children's children recount with triumphant mockery how this was done. One of the most authentic, and certainly derived from their own tradition, is the folk legend of the Aenians, a minor tribe which later lived in Thessaly. Driven away long before by the Lapiths from the plain of Dotion (south of Ossa in Thessaly) they wandered about here and there; everywhere they found the area too small and their neighbours too hostile, but at last, at Cirrha on the Gulf of Corinth, in a great drought, they killed their king Oenoclus by stoning, as the god commanded. Then they made their way to the valley of the Inachos in Thessaly, inhabited by Inachians and Achaeans, and decided to stay there. An oracle advised that the land would be their own if it were willingly given them, so the Aenian Temon disguised himself as a beggar, and inveigled the Inachian king into giving him, as if in mockery, a clod of earth which he gleefully put in his knapsack.' Too late the Inachian elders saw through the trick and warned their king to seize him. Temon escaped by promising a hundred oxen to Apollo. A duel of the two kings was arranged; the Aenian demanded that the Inachian should chase off the dog he had brought with him; and while he was turning away to do this, the Aenian threw a stone (that oldest of weapons) which killed him.
Thereupon the Aenians drove out the Inachians and the Achaeans, and worshipped the stone, offering sacrifices to it and covering it with the grease from the sacrificial animal. From then on, when the hundred oxen were regularly offered up to Apollo, the descendants of Temon always received the 'beggar's meat as it was called. The thoughts and feelings of the tribe in this legend would later be those of the polis, the later development and intensification of the tribe.
Struggle Between Internal Control and External Hegemony
As we shall see, the small state with a fortified town was very much aware that it needed to be limited in size and easily manageable. To control more extensive areas, in such a way that its individual settlements would not become centers of subversion, would have demanded either Spartan brutality or a quite exceptional natural disposition like that of the people of Attica. Attempts to form larger groups through alliances were only briefly successful, in times of war, but never in the long run. The hegemonies of Sparta and Athens were more and more hated the longer they went on, and the study of the polis will soon convince us that it was quite incapable of exercising even the minimal fairness towards weaker allies which would have served its own interests. The repeated attempts to make Boeotia a federal state were responsible for all the misfortunes of Boeotian history. Every alliance between Greeks seems characterized by the determination of the abler party to exploit and dominate. The traces of an early antiquity that was never fully understood, like the temple leagues or amphictyoniai, may safely be ignored in the period when the polis had come to full consciousness.
Circumstances of Fifth Century may have led some to lose this awareness.
More Than a Town or City
The feverish vital impulse which created the polis usually took the form of synoecism, the bringing of earlier village communities to settle together in a fortress town, if possible on the coast. The prevailing blend of piracy and commerce, features such as mountain foothills and bays, were perhaps the less essential influences; the chief consideration was to establish a strong political entity and to be prepared to resist neighbouring poleis in which the same process was at work. If the aim had been merely trade, material prosperity and so forth, the result would have been just a town or a city, but the polis was more than that.
However, the compulsive external incentive for its foundation was without doubt, in many cases, the movement known as the Dorian migration.
The migrants themselves, as well as those who successfully resisted them, were seeking a system which would promise greater strength both in defence and attack, and be its own raison d'être. We have seen above how, for Achaea, the transition from village communities to urban life was explicitly connected with the Dorian migration; what we learn of that process from the accounts we have must have been repeated many times.
Polis Essential to Full Development of Greek Culture
The process became the norm and was perpetuated. Whenever political power was to be concentrated, this drawing together of a population in a union of citizens took place, all having equal burdens, duties and rights, and within a locality usually already settled, but not previously fully fortified; however, it was not unusual for a completely new site to be chosen.
The political imagination which developed later was fond of embroidering on the model of the most famous example, handed down from mythical times: this was the synoecism of the people of Attica achieved by Theseus.' In the twelve districts in which Cecrops had formerly settled all the inhabitants together for their safety, it was Theseus who first abolished all their separate prytaneis (councillors) and archontes (chief administrators) and allowed only one council (bouleuterion) and one prytaneion in Athens to serve everybody. They might go on living outside the city on their own land, but they were to have only one polis, with everyone working together; it could be passed on to posterity as a great and powerful one. This was the arrangement generally desired everywhere, and progression towards this final system of the polis was an inherent tendency in Greece as a whole.
Without it the full development of Greek culture would not have been conceivable.
Violent Costs of Early Greek Synoecism
From the clearly recorded examples of the historical period, however, we learn of the sacrifices this synoecism might cost: violent resettlements of resisting populations or their extermination. What can only be guessed at is the misery of the many who complied, but were forced to leave their familiar villages, districts and small towns, or could continue to live in them and work the land only with much less security and prosperity. To be taken far away from the places where their forefathers were buried was itself a misfortune for the Greeks; they were obliged to give up the cult of the dead, or found it very hard to continue; in any case they missed the daily sight of their family graves. In the whole course of history there is hardly another such accumulation of bitter grief as in this Greek polis, where the people with the strongest sense of place, and reverence for it, were forced out of their own places by violent arbitrary decrees. These measures must usually have been carried out by powerful tyrannical minorities. In turbulent later times, the only way of escaping ruthless oppression must often have been to form a polis.
Small Yet Serious Beginnings
A telling symbol of the vitality of the polis and its struggle for birth is the story of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus. The Spartoi, a troop of armed men, sprang up where the teeth were planted, and when Cadmus threw a stone in their midst they fought until only five of them were left alive. From this remaining quintessence were descended the Cadmean families of what became Thebes. The idea of decreeing capital punishment for anyone who made fun of the city's defenses was also typical. Underlying it was the thought that it is easy to jeer, and hard to give practical help, and that beginnings have to be made in a small way. It was because he failed to understand this that Toxeus was killed by his father Oeneus of Calydon for jumping over the trench, exactly as Romulus killed his brother for the same offense.
The Making of the Polis: Mythic Founding; Great Men and Deeds
The making of a polis was the great, decisive experience in the whole existence of a population. Their way of life, even if they continued to cultivate the fields, became predominantly urban; formerly 'countrymen', they now lived side by side and became 'political', polis-beings. The importance of this experience was reflected in legends of the city's foundation, and of being saved from great dangers in the past. The city was conscious of its origin and gradual growth, of sacrifice and divine omens, all providing justification for its future.
Even the drinking water, which was the very prerequisite of a foundation, perhaps the one pure spring in a large area round about, had had to be fought for and won from a sinister adversary; Cadmus slew the dragon of Ares, which guarded the spring at the site of Thebes. In many cities, on the agora, in the precincts of a temple or on some other notable spot, was the grave of someone who, in ancient, perhaps mythical times, and given his life, or hers, voluntarily or involuntarily, for the birth or the preservation of the city, usually because of an oracle. For whatever flourished on earth had to pay the dark powers their due.
The Agora
When an urban proletariat developed in the cities, it was inevitably centered on the public square, and, thinking of the many activities in the Greek agora, Cyrus the Elder is said to have told a Spartan messenger: 'I am not afraid of a people who have a place in the middle of their cities where they meet to deceive each other with false oaths.' In an institution of national life, such as the agora, there is an inextricable mixture of great and small, good and bad; but from the point of view of history it is certain that the intellectual development of the Greeks cannot be imagined without conversation, and that this is true of them to a greater extent than it is of other nations; the agora and the symposium were the two vital settings for conversation.
Synthesis Between Norther Savage and Civilized Asiatic
If it could be said of any people that they were greater than their dwelling place, then it was true of the Greeks. The living polis, the community of citizens, was very much more than all its walls, harbours and splendid edifices. Aristotle says that man is by nature a polis-being. In an eloquent passage in Book 7 of Politics he then compares the Greek with the two kinds of barbarians, the northern savage and the civilized Asiatic, and acknowledges the best qualities of each — the valour of the one and the intelligence of the other - as attributes of the Greek, who is therefore not only capable of being free, and of developing the best political institutions, but also — as soon as he is able to form a state — fit to rule over all other peoples.
The Universal Rights of Man Denied
The notion of the rights of man did not exist anywhere in antiquity, not even in Aristotle. The polis, for him, is a community only of the free; the metics and the numerous slaves are not citizens, and whether, apart from that, they are human beings is not discussed (Politics 3:4). The demands that are made upon the citizen are in fact, as will be seen, not for all and sundry, and it would be impossible to make them applicable to everybody. Those living outside may, if they can defend and assert themselves, live like the Cyclops, without an agora and without laws, each man ruling over his own family (Odyssey IX.112); in the polis things are different.
Autakeia: Ideal Size and Population
The measure of population which a polis should contain is given in the word autarkeia, what is sufficient to itself. To our understanding this is a very obscure expression, but it was easily grasped by the Greeks. An area of land capable of yielding the essential supplies, commerce and industry to provide for all other needs in moderation, and a hoplite army at least as strong as that of the nearest, usually hostile, polis — these were the elements of sufficiency. Aristotle is as clear as could be wished on this; an overpopulated polis cannot really go on living according to the laws (Politics 7.4). It is the number of those who are fully citizens that makes a city great, not a preponderance of artisans with a small number of hoplites.
Beauty consists, here as elsewhere, in moderation and proportion. A ship a handspan long is not a ship, nor is one that measures two furlongs. A city with too few people is not self-sufficient; one that has too many can of course suffice for its own needs, but more as a mass than as a city, for it can have no true constitution, no politeia. What general could lead such a mass? What herald could serve, unless he were [Homer's] Stentor? To administer justice and to allot the offices to the deserving, the citizens must all know each other and each man's quality. Ideally the city should be as large as the needs of life dictate, while still remaining manageable. And it seems that a city of 10,000 adult citizens was considered to approximate to the desirable size; Heraclea Trachinia [in central Greece] had this number, and so did Catana [in Sicily] on its refoundation under the name of Etna. Then there was the popular assembly of the Ten Thousand in Arcadia, and, since even the utopias of the philosophers can throw so much light on the Greek state and Greek customs, we may mention that according to Hippodamus of Miletus the ideal state was to contain the same number.
The Polis Was a Product of Higher Nature
What the polis was, desired, was capable of or might be permitted, can best be deduced from its historical behavior. All the city-republics of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, though they often strongly remind us of the polis, were fundamentally different; they were separate parts of the previously existing larger realms and had broken away to become more or less independent. Even among the Italian city-states, only Venice possessed that absolute degree of autonomy that the polis enjoyed. Besides, the Church was a common bond, above and beyond all cities and kingdoms, and that was completely absent in Greece. But apart from these differences the polis in itself was a creation of quite another kind; it is as though, this one time in history, there emerged, fully developed in strength and single-mindedness, a will which had been waiting impatiently for its day on earth.
In modern times (philosophical and other idealistic programs aside) it is essential the single individual who postulates the State in the way he needs it. He demands of it only the security in which he will be able to develop his own powers; and in return he is willing to offer it carefully calculated sacrifices, but his sense of gratitude is in inverse proportion to the extent to which the State concerns itself with the rest of his activities.
The Greek polis, by contrast, starts from the whole, which is conceived of as chronologically prior to the start, whether the individual household or the individual person. An inner logic allows us to add that this whole will also survive the part. It is not only the general taking precedence over the particular, but also the eternal over the momentary and the transient. Not only on the battlefield and in emergencies was the individual expected to give all that he had and was; it was equally so at all times, for he owed everything to the whole; and, in the first place, that security of his very existence which was enjoyed only by the citizen, and then only within his own city or as far as its influence reached.
The polis was a higher product of Nature; it had come into being to make life possible, but continued to exist in order that life might be lived properly, happily, nobly and , as far as might be, in accordance with the standard of excellence. Anyone who had a part in ruling and being ruled was a citizen; the 'ruling' was more precisely defined as sharing in the judicial and other public offices. Only the citizen realized all his capacities and virtues in and for the State; the whole spirit of the Greeks and their culture was closely bound up with the polis, and, in the golden age, by far the highest achievements in poetry and the arts belonged to public life, not the realm of private pleasures.
The Whole Greater Than Any Individual Part
However, the great deeds really belonged not to the individual but to the native city, it was the city, not Miltiades or Themistocles, that was victorious at Marathon and Salamis, and Demosthenes [in the next century] considers it a symptom of decadence that many have begun to say 'Timotheus took Corcyra' or 'Chabrias defeated the enemy at Naxos.' Even the most meritorious citizen always owed more to his native city than the city did to him. Pythagoras taught that anyone who has been treated unjustly by his native city should confront her as he would his mother in a similar case.
An Educative Force
The polis was, further, an educative force; not only 'the best of nurses, who when you were at play on the soft earth faithfully nourished and cherished you and found no care too tedious' — but continuing to educate the citizen throughout his life. She kept no school, though she promoted the traditional instruction in music and gymnastics. We need not detail here the many opportunities for spiritual development available to all citizens in the choral odes at the festivals, in the splendid cult rituals, buildings and works of art, and in the drama and recitations by the poets. It was the very fact of living in the polis, the ruling and being ruled, which was valued as a continuous education.
In the better times the polis gave her people very strong guidance through the honors she could confer on individuals, until here too abuses set in, and wiser men preferred to forgo their claim to crowns, heralds' proclamations and so forth. In sum, the whole previous history of a famous city seemed one of the strongest encouragements to excellence: nowhere but in Athens, says Xenophon (Memorabilia 3.5.3), could men tell so many glorious stories of the deeds of their ancestors, and many citizens, first inspired by this, then sought to dedicate themselves to virtue and to become strong.
Rising Above Mere Village Life
So the polis, with its vitality much more developed than that of the Phoenician city-republic, was a creation unique in the history of the world. It was the expression of a common will of the most extraordinary vigour and capability; indeed the polis succeeded in rising above mere village life thanks only to its deeds, the power it exercised, its passion. This was why the strictest criteria were needed for the definition of a full citizen, who after all was to form a part of this power. These poleis underwent quite a different order of good and bad fortune from the cities of other peoples and other epochs, and even in the liveliest of the mediaeval republics, such an intensity of living and suffering was only occasionally attained.
Severe and Inescapable
Hence too their violence. Externally the polis was in general isolated, despite all treaties and alliances, and was frequently competing with its nearest neighbours for its very life. In time of war, martial laws were in force with all their terrors.
Internally, the polis was implacable towards any individual who ceased to be totally absorbed in it. Its sanctions, often put into practice, were death, loss of civic rights, and exile. And we must bear in mind that there was no appeal to any external tribunal, except when cases were referred to be heard in the courts of Athens from cities in her empire. The polis was completely inescapable, for any desire to escape entailed the loss of all personal security. The absence of individual freedom went hand in hand with the omnipotence of the State in every context. Religion, the sacral calendar, the myths — all these were nationalized, so that the State was at the same time a church, empowered to try charges of impiety, and against this dual power the individual was totally helpless. His body was in bond for military service in Athens and Sparta till the end of his life, in Rome until his forty-sixth year; and his possessions were entirely in the power of the city, which could even determine the value of many of them.
In short there could be no guarantees of life or property that ran counter to the polis and the interests. Although this enslavement of the individual to the State existed under all constitutions, it must have been at its most oppressive under democracy, where the most villainous men, ridden by ambition, identified themselves with the polis and its interests and could therefore interpret in their own way the maxim saluas reipublicae suprema lex esto ('let the safety of the Republic be the highest law'). Thus the polis got the maximum price for the small amount of security it afforded.
Why The Greek Needs No Church
Yet since, in good times, all that was highest and noblest in the life of the Greeks was centered upon the polis, then fundamentally the polis was their religion. The worship of the gods found its strongest support against alien religions, philosophies and other undermining forces in its importance for the particular city, which had to maintain this worship exactly and in full, and the main cults were mainly the direct concern of the State. So while the polis was itself a religion, it contained the rest of religion within itself as well, and the communal nature of the sacrifices and festivals formed a very strong bond among the citizens, quite apart from the laws, the constitution and the public life they shared.
Because all this is offered by the State and only by the State, it is perfectly clear why the Greek needs no church, why, in order to show piety in his own way, he need only be a good citizen; why there is no question of hierarchic rivalries, why the highest cult official in Athens, the archon basileus, is a State official, and why, finally, it is an offence not only against the duties of a citizen, but also against loyalty to the faith, to worship the gods in any rites but those recognized by the State.
Note On the Polis in Decline
When the polis began to decline, the cult of the gods no longer sufficed, not even that of the 'gods (and heroes) who protect the city, and the polis deified itself as Tyche (Fortune) with her crown of walls. This transition becomes very clear in some lines of Pindar's. Tyche is one of the personifications of Moira, or Fate, and it is in this general character that Pindar addresses her, asking her favour for one particular city: “I beg you, daughter of Zeus the Deliverer, to protect strong Himera, Tyche our saviour! At sea you command the swift ships, and on land the fierce battling armies and the wise counsels of the agora.”
But the cult of the single city, idealized as Tyche, had probably begun in various places by the fifth century, with special temples and sometimes a colossal statue. The usual earlier representations of Tyche, like that set up by Bupalos for the Smyrnians, showed her with her wand and cornucopia; now her attributes were the crown of walls and some feature of the particular city. Some superb figures were made for the purpose, for instance the row of bronzes Pausanias speaks of (1.18.6) fronting the columns of Hadrian's Olympieion in Athens, representing the Tychai of the Athenian colonies.
Later on Tyche herself was not enough, when the democracies who had taken power in most cities rubbed salt in the wounds of their defeated opponents by idealizing themselves as Demos. This, too, often took the form of colossal statues, like the one in the agora at Sparta, which must have been put up at the lowest point in the fortunes of the city. As this Demos was usually shown in the likeness of the so-called 'good daimon', it could become the object of a real cult. The point of all these deifications could only be the certainty of continuing prosperity; there is no record of the way people viewed such statues when everything lay in ruins.
The Polis Could Command Nomos to Serve Higher Life
There was also another sense and another form in which the polis regarded itself as an ideal whole, and that was its nomos, a word used to embrace the laws and with the constitution. Nomos is the higher objective power, supreme over all individual existence or will, not satisfied merely to protect the citizens in return for taxes and military service, as in modern times, but aspiring to be the very soul of the whole polis. Law and the constitution are hymned in the most sublime phrases as the invention and gift of the gods, as the city's personality, as the guardians and preservers of all virtue. They are the 'rulers of the cities', and Demaratus the Spartan seeks to explain to Xerces that his people fear King Law (despotes nomos) more than the Persians fear their Great King.
The officials in particular are, as Plato puts it, to be the slaves of the law. The lawgiver therefore appeared as a superhuman being, and the glory of Lycurgus, Solon, Zaleucus and Charondas sheds a reflected light on much later men, so that for instance, as late as about 400 B.C. the Syracusan law reformer Diocles received heroic honors and even a temple after his death.
The Polis Still Produced Strong Individuals
For, as we shall see, the Greek idea of the State, with its total subordination of the individual to the general, had at the same time developed a strong tendency to encourage individuality. These tremendous individual forces ought in theory to have evolved entirely in the general interest, to have become its most vital expression; freedom and subordination ought to have been harmoniously fused into a unity. But in fact the Greek idea of freedom is qualified from the start, because, as we have said, the polis was inescapable; the individual could not even take refuge in religion, since this too belonged to the State, and in any case there was no assurance that the gods were kind and merciful. The highly gifted, obliged to stay on and endure, strove to gain power in the State. Individuals and parties ruled in the name of the polis. Whatever party happened to be in power behaved exactly as though it were the whole polis and had the right to exert its full authority.
Greek Attitude Toward Tyranny
In antiquity, anyone who believed he had the right to rule, or who merely wished to rule, at once resorted to extreme measures against his opponents and rivals, even to annihilating them. Occasionally in some unemphatic words of the poets this way of thinking slips out as the normal one. One need only to study the speeches the tutor in Euripides' Ion, where he urges Creusa to murder Xuthus and Ion.
Would it be possible, we wonder, for a criminal character in any modern drama to express himself so candidly in the name of power and authority? All political punishments in these city-states (some of them, it is true, for very serious offences) have the quality of revenge and of extermination. We shall see examples of punishment visited not only on the children of those exiled or executed but on their ancestors as well, when the family tombs were laid waste.
The Greeks thought they saw a clear alternative; either we destroy these people or they destroy us —and they acted accordingly with ruthless logic. The characteristic feature of this terrorism was its solemnity. The fact that tyrannicides, if they survived their deed, might receive the highest honours and be commemorated after death with monuments and rites, is too well known to give us pause. But one consequence was that obscure cutthroats were named as benefactors of society, granted citizenship, publicly crowned at the Great Dionysian festival and so forth, because they happened to have murdered a man later found to have been a rogue and a traitor, like Phrynichus at Athens in 411 B.C., while their accomplices would at least have their names inscribed on the memorial column and be rewarded in other ways. The intention of the ruling party here was by no means just to intimidate and humiliate its remaining enemies, but chiefly to make their own triumph as striking as possible. Those who did the deed were honored irrespective of their motives or their personal qualities.
Any Break with the Polis Was Fatal
Because the polis was the highest of all things for the Hellenes, in fact their religion, the struggles that surrounded it had all the horror of religious wars, and any break with the polis would cut off the individual from all normal conditions of life. Civil war was bewailed as the worst of all wars, the most appalling and most godless, loathsome to gods and men, but this insight did not bring peace. In many cities the existing constitution, whatever it may have been, was the orthodoxy, and was defended by all the methods of terrorism.
For generations, no-one dared to say openly that the fiction of the duties of citizenship as paramount had overstretched what human nature could bear, but there was no way of preventing the growth of secret, inner disaffection among intellectuals, and as time went on some came forward to declare it openly and defiantly.
Philosophical ethics followed, gave up its earlier identification with the State and became the ethics of humanity in general. In the school of Epicurus, the polis is stripped of all its feverish divinization to become a mutual contract of security among all its members. The real poleis, however, convulsed as they were, continued on the path of violence. One thing they could not do was to surrender their autonomy to another city, a larger federal state or a ruler. Later the polis was to struggle for survival at any price amid terrible sufferings. “A single wicked man,' says Isocrates 'may die before retribution overtakes him; but cities, since they cannot die, must suffer the vengeance of men and gods.”
So the polis, with its vitality much more developed than that of the Phoenician city-republic, was a creation unique in the history of the world.
It was the expression of a common will of the most extraordinary vigour and capability; indeed the polis succeeded in rising above mere village life thanks only to its deeds, the power it exercised, its passion.
This was why the strictest criteria were needed for the definition of a full citizen, who after all was to form a part of this power.
These poleis underwent quite a different order of good and bad fortune from the cities of other peoples and other epochs, and even in the liveliest of the mediaeval republics, such an intensity of living and suffering was only occasionally attained.