Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Polis is thus often translated as 'city-state'. The model, however, fares no better than any other. City-states no doubt existed, but so also did many poleis that were not city-states. The minimum semantic load of this hyphenated neologism is that the referent must be a city and must be a sovereign state.
This is an incomplete list of ancient Greek cities, including colonies outside Greece, and including settlements that were not sovereign poleis.Many colonies outside Greece were soon assimilated to some other language but a city is included here if at any time its population or the dominant stratum within it spoke Greek.
This slump was permanent, due to the introduction of a stricter definition of citizen described below. From a modern perspective, these figures may seem small, but among Greek city-states Athens was huge: most of the thousand or so Greek cities could only muster 1,000–1,500 adult male citizens each; and Corinth, a major power, had at most 15,000.
A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. [1] They have existed in many parts of the world throughout history, including cities such as Rome, Carthage, Athens and Sparta and the Italian city-states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan.
In the city states of classical Greece, synoecism occurred when the "demos" combined with and subordinated, usually by force, the "politiea" in one polity. [ 5 ] In the poleis , the synoikistes was the person who according to tradition executed the synoecism, either by charisma or outright conquest; he was subsequently worshiped as a demi-god.
The Greek Dark Ages (c. 1100 – c. 800 BC) refers to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean civilization in the 11th century BC to the rise of the first Greek city-states in the 9th century BC and the epics of Homer and earliest writings in the Greek alphabet in the 8th century BC.
Athens is one of the oldest named cities in the world, having been continuously inhabited for perhaps 5,000 years. Situated in southern Europe, Athens became the leading city of ancient Greece in the first millennium BC, and its cultural achievements during the 5th century BC laid the foundations of Western civilization.
In the following centuries, independent city-states of Greece, especially Athens, developed the polis, an association of male landowning citizens who collectively constituted the city. [74] The agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of the athletic, artistic, spiritual, and political life of the polis. [75]