Bright lights, big cities

On February 19, 1933, participants at the first All-Soviet Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers were treated to a radical new take on the old problem of the transition from slavery to feudalism. “It was the great slave uprisings of the declining Roman Republic”, declared Joseph Stalin, “which annihilated the slave-owner class and the slave-owner society.” Stalin’s grasp of history was famously shaky, but the notion of Greco-Roman slavery being killed off by the rebellion of Spartacus was, even for him, something of a stretch. With a collective groan Soviet historians spent the following two decades trying to make real-life history fit Stalinist theory. Surely slave ownership continued to flourish throughout the long centuries of the high Roman Empire? Ah, but maybe this was a kind of zombie slave society, whose foundations were indeed destroyed by Spartacus in 73–71BC. Maybe the whole first millennium AD should be seen as a transitional phase in a multi-phase revolution, the decisive moment of which was indeed, as comrade Stalin has shown …

The history of the city-states (poleis) of ancient Greece has long been infected by a nasty case of Stalinitis. After all, historians used to know (or thought they knew) that the “golden age” of the Greek polis was the fifth century BC, the age of Pericles and the Parthenon, Socrates and Sophocles, democracy and red-figure vases; they knew that the age of the city-state came to an end in 338BC, at the Battle of Chaeronea, when an alliance of the major poleis was crushed by the armies of Philip II of Macedon. But, inconveniently, the Greek city-state continued to give the impression of rude health right down through the Hellenistic period (third to first centuries BC) and under the Roman Empire. In fact, most of our actual evidence for the Greek city-states – their temples and public buildings; their coins, transport amphorae and grave markers; above all, their thousands upon thousands of public documents, inscribed on stone by autonomous democratic governments – long post-dated the supposed “fall of the polis” at Chaeronea.

Self-evidently, the Greek city-state was no more killed off by Philip II than slavery was killed by Spartacus. But the notion that the Greek polis was somehow moribund (or decadent, or enfeebled) after Chaeronea has taken a remarkably long time to dissipate. The most ambitious modern research project on the Greek polis, the Copenhagen Polis Centre (1993–2005), restricted its object of study to the “archaic” and “classical” periods, before Chaeronea; as recently as 2015 the (excellent) American historian Josiah Ober, in his The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, could still describe Chaeronea as marking the “political fall” of the Greek city-state.

Only in the second half of the twentieth century did a more capacious chronology of the Greek polis start to crystallize. The great French scholar Louis Robert and his pupils used evidence from inscriptions to prove the institutional vitality (and variety) of Greek polis-democracies in the post-classical world. The Oxford historian Fergus Millar (to whose memory John Ma’s Polis is dedicated) demonstrated that Greek civic communities did not just survive under the Roman Empire, but arguably shaped the Roman imperial state in their own image, from the bottom up. Perhaps the key turning point in the anglophone world was the publication of Ma’s doctoral thesis, Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor (1999), which showed for the first time quite how much agency Greek cities possessed in their interactions and negotiations with the Macedonian warlords who dominated the Greek world in the centuries after Alexander the Great, Philip II’s son. A quarter of a century on from Antiochos III, Ma has produced the definitive road map to the “new landscape” of Greek polis history that he did so much to open up in the first place.

After a glance at Bronze Age and Iron Age Greece, Ma’s story begins with what he calls the “obscure leap to statehood” in the early seventh century BC. In an explosion of creative fervour across the Aegean world, hundreds of small village-communities started simultaneously to experiment with new political and judicial institutions (rotating one-year magistracies, inscribed laws, representative councils). At the same time we can see these communities dividing their population into age classes, tribes and other formal subdivisions, and laying out compact new urban centres around distinct public and private spaces. In the sixth century these civic laws and institutions become increasingly systematized – direct taxation emerges for the first time, as does a clearly articulated concept of “citizenship” as a bundle of duties and privileges.

In a bravura passage of argument Ma shows how these emergent political communities gravitated towards one of two basic forms. Some, such as Sparta and the cities of East Lokris, north of Athens, were “closed” communities, with power shared within a small and homogenous group of peers, often with a strong ideology of austerity and lawfulness; others, like Athens and West Lokris, adopted “open” systems with an inclusive and participatory concept of citizenship. Paradoxically, obnoxious rich people were more visible in the “open” systems because these could accommodate more cultural diversity among their members; but successful “open” poleis (including Athens) rapidly worked out how to channel their elites’ ambitions into socially non-harmful spheres such as athletics and competitive gift-giving.

Ma’s next step – a move of great boldness and originality – is to reframe what we usually call the “classical” period as something like the nadir of polis history, not its peak. From 464 to 362, the Greek city-states were locked in a devastating Hundred Years War of horrific inter- and intra-communal violence (analysed by the historian Thucydides, among other ancient writers). Civil war – in Greek, stasis – was a depressingly normal feature of civic life, usually between groups favouring “open” or “closed” systems, who now increasingly self-identified as “democrats” and “oligarchs”. Meanwhile, the larger cities (Athens, Sparta, Thebes) flayed their smaller neighbours in a series of short-lived, viciously exploitative micro-imperial episodes (the fifth-century Athenian empire being the first and longest-lasting). Reversing the standard view, Ma sees the end of this grim period as the moment when the polis truly starts to come into its own. From the mid-fourth century BC the “closed” model of citizenship collapses pretty much everywhere; oligarchy is discredited, stasis largely disappears and we see a “great convergence” of civic institutions across the Greek world. Civic autonomy and freedom become universalized as values, a process that leads to a decline in inter-polis imperialism; for the first time, clusters of smaller poleis are free to develop federal institutions, since cities (even ones of very different sizes) are willing to interact as peers rather than as potential predators and victims.

As a result it was the poleis of what we now call the Hellenistic world – after, not before, the supposed watershed of Chaeronea – that finally achieved economic and social lift-off. Ma argues, provocatively but persuasively, that the six and a half centuries from 350BC to AD300, from the “Hellenistic” to the “Roman” world, should be reconceived as a single “long Classical period” of stability, prosperity and egalitarian self-government in the Greek polis. Even the coming of Roman rule over the Greek world, he argues, made less difference than you might have thought. Yes, the Roman state worked out rapidly how to instrumentalize the Greek cities in its own interests (by delegating the grimy work of tax collection and local law enforcement to Greek polis elites); but the flipside of this was the continuation of the polis as an egalitarian, self-governing, self-conscious citizen community, partners in empire rather than its victims. Only in the fourth century AD, when systemic financial and military crisis led to a dramatic centralization of Roman imperial government, did the old city-states finally decline into mere urban centres.

The detailed working out, generation by generation, of his radical new vision of the history of the polis takes Ma more than 400 pages of small type, not counting endnotes. It’s not quite a comprehensive new history of ancient Greece: his focus on the internal dynamics of city-state culture means that, for instance, the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC hardly merit a mention. Nor does Ma have much to say about Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic successors (the Ptolemies, Seleucids and others), who appear only as shadowy constraining factors limiting the scale and impact of polis imperialism after 300BC. But on its own terms this is a narrative of quite exceptional power and explanatory depth, one that makes most recent work on Greek history feel timid and parochial. Time and again – perhaps above all in Ma’s luminous account of the seventh and sixth centuries BC – I found myself shaking my head in astonishment and admiration.

The final third of the book is made up of synthetic essays exploring the polis as a society, as a set of ethical and political ideals, as a system of competing interests and as a structure of inequalities. Aristotle’s Politics is a key point of reference throughout (though Ma writes a lot better than Aristotle), and these chapters share something of a ruminative and exploratory seminar-like feel with the Politics. Two key contentions are to the fore. The first is that the polis ought to be taken seriously as a true exercise in “power-sharing among the whole community”, with autonomy and self-governance as its key defining characteristics. In the modern world we are used to seeing the state as one thing, society as another; in Greek poleis, Ma argues, the two were all but indistinguishable. The remarkably “thin” state apparatus of annually rotating magistracies and mass deliberative bodies reflects a world in which the citizen body really did, in the most literal sense, run the show.

Ma’s second and more controversial thesis hinges on the role of the Greek cities’ elites. At one end of the period, the emergence of civic institutions in the archaic Greek world is often interpreted as a means of regulating and defusing elite conflicts over power (in effect, the laying down of ground rules that both the Medicis and the Borgias would agree to play by); at the other end, the late Hellenistic period, from the second century BC, is often thought to have seen a wholesale elite capture of polis institutions, with civic offices thereafter monopolized by the hyper-rich. Ma pushes back gently but firmly against both positions. In the early Greek world, “we do not see phenomena that elite dominance would lead us to expect, such as the entrenchment of class interests, the rise of a society of orders [or] delicate bargaining between families or groups”; in the later Greek world, “instead of entrenched civic landholding aristocracies dominating weak poleis, we notice the breadth and demographic fragility of the elites [and] the persistence of institutional and ideological power wielded by the People’s assembly”. It’s an optimistic picture; not everyone will be persuaded.

Even without its 150 pages of endnotes and bibliography, Polis clocks in at well over a quarter of a million words; nonetheless, in some ways it still feels too short. Much of the book is built on a formidable base of evidence from archaeology and inscriptions, patiently assembled and vividly and deftly deployed (Ma is the master of the engaging case study); I ended up longing for more on literature and art. The short chapter on Homer is one of the best in the book, full of life and colour, and superb on the obstreperous, voluble, proto-polis communities of the Iliad and Odyssey; in the same vein I would have loved to hear Ma’s take on that most political of literary genres, Greek tragedy, which so vividly dramatizes the tensions between the individual and the collective in polis life. The focus of the book is ruthlessly Hellenocentric: I wish Ma had taken a few pages to tell us whether he sees early Rome and other cities of central Italy as falling into the polis model, and when and why they took a different path. Most seriously of all, the focus on institutions leaves little space for those inhabitants of Greek cities (the majority) who were excluded from formal political life: women, the rural population, foreigners and slaves. Ma wishes to see the economic flourishing of the Hellenistic polis as the result of civic trust, good institutions and low transaction costs; some readers may reasonably wonder whether it might owe just as much to the exploitation of unfree labour from the underdeveloped periphery of the Greek world (Thrace, Phrygia, Syria).

But enough carping. Polis is a vast, generous and deeply humane book, the work of an extraordinary scholar at the peak of his powers. It is fired by a profound faith in the long-term capacity of human communities, even quite large ones, to govern themselves peacefully and prosperously on the basis of mass power-sharing. Non-specialist readers will undoubtedly find parts of it hard going; John Ma makes few concessions to those who don’t know their Solon from their Tyrtaeus. But make no mistake: this is history-writing at its very best. I cannot recommend it too highly.

Peter Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman history at Wadham College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Lives of Ancient Villages, 2022

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