Polis is a Greek word that we translate as "city-state". It is a bad translation, because the ordinary polis was not much like a city, and was much more than a state...
The ancient Greek polis is largely the foundation of what we now call Western civilization - and civilization is just a Latin translation of one of the many meanings of the term polis.
Ever since Homer, the word polis has had at least three meanings: an urban settlement, an independent political (well, there is no other word) community similar to today's state and, finally, a collection of citizens in the sense of an organized community. Aristotle's famous definition of man as a social animal can also be translated as "Man is a being who lives in a polis."
There is no simple explanation why in Greece - and only in Greece - a network of often warring poliss arose, which was basically destroyed only by Philip's and Alexander's conquests. Until then, "the Greek, despite the demands of common sense, could not bring himself to sacrifice the polis with its full and versatile life to a wider but less interesting unity." Aristotle believed that a polis of 10 citizens could not exist because it was not self-sufficient, and one of 100.000 citizens would be meaningless because it would not be able to govern itself properly. It is best if all citizens of a polis know each other. At the beginning, the mosaic of Greek polises in the Eastern Mediterranean consisted of about two hundred independent units, and after the colonization from the 1500th to the XNUMXth century, there were about XNUMX of them, with a multitude of political, religious and cultural differences.
"From Chaeronea it is twenty stadia to Panopeia, a Phokidean city - if a city can be called a place that has no government, gymnasium, theater, square, or public fountain," says Pausanias, a Greek who lived during the Roman reign. His doubt is still valid today, regardless of the fact that today's supercities claim to have everything, even pedestrian zones for citizens.
