11 C.S. Starr, Individual and Community

C.S. Starr, Individual and Community. The Rise of the Polis 800-500 B.C., Oxford U.P.
, 1986,
chapter III, Crystallization of the Polis
In Homer the term polis denotes an agglomeration of people, sometimes fortified, or a

person's homeland, but does not directly have a political significance. From the eighth century on
[approx. 750 B.C.] it does have that meaning, a state marked by regular rules of procedure and a
structure by which its citizens () could establish and administer those rules; in the polis,
moreover, all major activity was conducted at one specific spot not by bureaucrats but by the
citizens themselves.
In a provocative, brief communication Snodgrass has recently suggested that several archeologically
attested developments of the era are relevant:
1. agricultural changes (by which he seems to mean the expansion of cultivated land and so of
population) and
2. the appearance of religious shrines as centers for civic unity (in the eighth century B.C. it
may actually be that the desire for divine support for the community was a primary, not a
secondary, factor in encouraging political unification).
3. To these should be added the tendency for an aristocratic stratum to appear within the Greek
ethnos and
4. the outburst of colonization.
Anthropological Models
At the moment anthropologists are divided between two major, competing theories to account for
the change from tribal organization to the consciously structured state.
1. In the one model economic and social stratification does emerge and produces a "ranked" society
with considerable tension. For one thing there are "fewer positions of valued status than individuals
capable of handling them" (). Further, there is a shift from communal to private property which
is assembled in the hands of a limited upper class, desirous of maintaining the privileges therewith
associated. () Thus the state is consciously evolved to defend the privileges of a dominant class
and the sanctity of private property; primary in the state are systems of public control (army, police,
militia), but the leaders also manipulate modes of communication to achieve "ideological
legitimization of the system of stratification."
2. "These first governments seem clearly to have reenforced their structure by doing their economic
and religious jobs wellby providing benefitsrather than by using physical force." A strong
central government, in sum, was a gradual evolution as "a response to the need for increased
integrative mechanisms in larger and more complex structures."
The difficulty in the end is the failure of the theory that the state is an agent primarily to repress
the multitude to match the actual conditions of the Greek world in the eighth century.
Kissinger's Years of Upheaval, to turn to the modern period, has an interesting portrayal of Japanese
statesmen: "The West developed a system of government based on a concept of authority: the right
to issue orders that are accepted because they reflect legal or constitutional forms. Japan relies on
consensus. A leader's eminence does not imply a right to impose his will on his peers, but the
opportunity to elicit their agreement ()."
The pattern of political organization and operation which Kissinger finds in Japan seems far more
consonant with the eighth-century Greek world than the theory that the state primarily embodies
force. In the economic base of the era there was not the great gulf which existed in the Near East;
the epics suggest a strong spirit of general communal unity, in which the kings persuade rather
than commanda spirit not easily set aside. In the end, thus, the second anthropological model,
which () posits the emergence of the state as a "need for increased integrative mechanisms in
larger and more complex structures," surely leads us further in understanding the crystallization of
the polis.
So too one may argue that in eighth century Greece one or another ethnos decided to create stronger
bonds. The advantages, both internally and externally, were so evident that the innovation
extended into neighboring peoples with great rapidity ().
The polis was always a one-celled structure in contrast to the complexities of vast modern states
(); but the later Western world may well be grateful to the Greeks for creating a pattern of
political organization in which the citizen had rights and duties under the rule of law.

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C.S. Starr, Individual and Community. The Rise of the Polis 800-500 B.C., Oxford U.P.

In Homer the term polis denotes an agglomeration of people, sometimes fortified, or a

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