World Civ: Emergence of the Greek Polis

By this time the Greeks are rising as a civilization. The Aegean has been repopulated since the destruction wrought by Thera and though the new civilization will build few empires, it is one that will influence the greater powers of the western world for centuries to come.

At the heart of this new system is the polis, a “city” after a sort, though more of an idea than a walled town, though the agora, or local meeting place, can function as a defensible location. Each of the local families is known as an oikos, and each oikos includes the extended family, as well as dependents. Local families join together to form a genos and it is a collection of these clans that collect into a polis. Curiously, the individual oikos do not restrain their allegiance to their polis, but allow for close ties to the families of other cities, forming an ethnos that competes with the polis establishment.

As time goes on, the various cities coalesce into actual towns, as farming in the deforested Grecian countryside leads to population growth. Once the towns grow to a certain size, however, some people begin seeking new homes and leave to form colonies, or apoika. Unlike the colonies of other peoples, however, these establishments hold themselves politically aloof, preferring to maintain only ceremonial ties to their mother cities. The Greeks hate the idea of another lording over them, and this attitude stalls the colonization effort around the middle 500s, as the now sea-faring Greeks find the Mediterranean increasingly occupied by Phoenicians, Etruscans, and other peoples. It is also this staunch individualism that shall prevent the Greeks from forming empires, as we shall see by and by.

But if the Greeks are sundered politically and by the mountainous terrain, they are unified by their culture. They share the same warrior standards of hoplites in close phalanxes and the love the tales of Homer, wherein the heroes do battle for glory – an irony since the warrior heroes at Ilium battled individually, so unlike the phalanx formations used by the Greeks. More, the Greeks love philosophers, who love to discuss strange ideas, from the rationalization of reality, to the religion created by their Homer. Interestingly, said religion has little bearing on politics, which are rather more defined by personality (a tyranny) or by citizenship.