Polis - Archaic and Classical Polis

Archaic and Classical Polis

Basic and indicating elements are:

• Self-governance, autonomy and independence (city-state)
• Agora: the social hub and financial marketplace, on and around a centrally located large open space
• Acropolis: the citadel, inside which a temple had replaced the erstwhile Mycenaean anáktoron (palace) or mégaron (hall)
• Greek urban planning and architecture, public, religious, and private (see Hippodamian plan)
• Temples, altars and sacred precincts: one or more are dedicated to the poliouchos, the patron deity of the city; each polis kept its own particular festivals and customs (Political religion, as opposed to the individualized religion of the later antiquity). Priests and priestesses, although often drawn from certain families by tradition, did not form a separate collegiality or class: they were ordinary citizens who, on certain occasions, were called to perform certain functions.
• Gymnasia
• Theatres
• Walls: used for protection from invaders
• Coins: minted by the city, and bearing its symbols
• Colonies being founded by the oikistes of the metropolis
• Political life: it revolved around the sovereign Ekklesia (the assembly of all adult male citizens for deliberation and voting), the standing boule and other civic or judicial councils, the archons and other officials or magistrates elected either by vote or by lot, clubs, etc., and sometimes punctuated by stasis (civil strife between parties, factions or socioeconomic classes, e.g. aristocrats, oligarchs, democrats, tyrants, the wealthy, the poor, large or small landowners, etc.).There were practising the direct democracy.
• Publication of state functions: laws, decrees and major fiscal accounts were published, and criminal and civil trials were also held in public
• Synoecism, conurbation: Absorption of nearby villages and countryside, and the incorporation of their tribes into the substructure of the polis. Many of a polis' citizens would have lived in the suburbs or countryside. The Greeks did not regard the polis as a territorial grouping so much as a religious and political association: while the polis would control territory and colonies beyond the city itself, the polis would not simply consist of a geographical area. Most cities were composed of several tribes or phylai, which were in turn composed of phratries (common-ancestry lineages), and finally génea (extended families)
• Social classes and citizenship: Dwellers in the polis were generally divided into four types of inhabitants, with status typically determined by birth:
  • Citizens with full legal and political rights, i.e. adult free men born legitimately of citizen parents. They had the right to vote, be elected into office, bear arms, and the obligation to serve when at war.
  • Citizens without formal political rights, but full legal rights: the citizens' female relatives and underage children, whose political rights and interests were represented, and property held in trust, by their adult male relatives.
  • Citizens of other poleis who chose to reside elsewhere (the metics, μέτοικοι, métoikoi, literally "transdwellers"): though free-born and possessing full rights in their place of origin, had full legal rights but no political rights in their place of residence. Metics could not vote, could not be elected to office, could not bear arms and could not serve in war. They otherwise had full personal and property rights, albeit subject to taxation.
  • Slaves: chattel in full possession of their owner, and with no privileges other what their owner would grant (or revoke) at will.