For ancient Greeks, the polis was not a city but the entire homeland
Translating polis as city misses its meaning. For an ancient Greek, the polis was the native land itself, with its own constitution and a claim on supreme loyalty. Greece was not a country at all, just the territory where Greek speakers lived, scattered across some 1,500 independent communities.
A Danish project, the Copenhagen Polis Centre, spent a decade from 1993 cataloguing these communities and counted about 1,500 in the Archaic and Classical periods, stretching from southern Spain to the Caucasus and from southern Russia to northern Egypt. Many survive as ordinary cities in other countries, among them Marseille and Syracuse. The researchers described the whole as a network of micro-states. Colonies spread them: a mother city, or metropolis, sent settlers abroad to ease crowding or crisis, and the new town kept its founders' ethnic label however far away it lay.
The Greeks did not keep the word only for themselves. Aristotle treated Phoenician-speaking Carthage as a polis and compared its constitution with Sparta's. The term runs through Greek writing from the start, appearing up to 350 times in the Iliad, and over time it came to mean both state and community. Oddly, the word for the physical town, its buildings and streets, was a different one, asty.
Philosophers made the polis their central subject. Plato's Republic, whose Greek title derives from the word, imagines an ideal community steered like a ship by a philosopher king who knows the Good, with four civic virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation and justice. His student Aristotle took the opposite tack, sending students out to study real poleis and their governments. Of the resulting collection only two works survive, the Politics and the Athenian Constitution.
Modern historians still argue over what a polis was. Eric Voegelin linked its birth to Greeks banding together after the Dorian invasions, though his own chief example, Athens, seems to undercut that story. Fustel de Coulanges pictured cities growing from families into clans and tribes, a tidy scheme that Livy's account of Rome's rough founding does not match. No single model has yet covered every case.
Source: Polis
