A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State

The ancient Greek polis, or city-state, was a resilient and adaptable political institution founded on the principles of citizenship, freedom, and equality. Emerging around 650 BCE and lasting until 350 CE, it offered a means for collaboration among fellow city-states and social bargaining between a community and its elites—but at what cost? 

In Polis, John Ma, chair of the Classics Department, provides a new history of the origins, evolution, and scope of the early Greek city-state. He gives an account of its diverse forms and enduring characteristics over the span of a millennium. Charting the spread and development of poleis (the plural of polis) into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa, and from the Near East to Italy, Ma explores the polis’s achievements as a political form offering community, autonomy, prosperity, public goods, and spaces of social justice for its members.

Ma also discusses how, behind the successes of civic ideology and institutions, lie entanglements with domination, empire, and enslavement. His narrative draws widely on historical evidence, weighs in on scholarly debates, and gives new readings of Aristotle as the great theoretician of the polis.

Ma talks about the book with Columbia News, along with what books he’s read lately and those he’s planning to read next, and who he would like to converse with at his next dinner party.

Why did you write this book now?

I have to smile wryly at this question, because I started writing the book in 2012. At the time, during a conversation with Josh Ober, a Stanford University professor and one of the great historians of Athenian democracy and Greek society, it occurred to me that I probably had a grasp of a lot of the things that made the Greek city-state tick—“the polis from soup to nuts,” as Josh put it.

It took me over 10 years to work those ideas out. They reflect an old obsession with city-states, ancient Greece, and the possibility of democracy and freedom in local contexts. The theme stayed relevant, even after I moved from the U.K. to the U.S. to teach at Columbia in 2015: We still live with issues that Aristotle, the great theorist of the polis, flagged in his Politics—how government should provide public goods, what political community is, and how to manage tension between political equality and economic equality. 

Can you cite examples from the book of ancient city-states that combined positive attributes (community, autonomy, social justice) with negative ones (domination, empire, enslavement)?

The obvious answer would be the biggest and best-known polis, classical Athens (508-322 BCE)—a large polity that achieved a stable democracy, and also headed an empire based on tribute extraction. It always was an enslavement society in that its economy used enslaved labor at all levels, including to produce the internal surplus that was redistributed through taxation. But in a way, these traits hold true for ancient Greece as a city-state culture (to use the expression forged by Mogens Hansen, the great Danish historian of the polis, who died earlier this year).

Most poleis tried to find legitimate forms of collective action (hence the convergence toward democratic forms, which is a major theme of my book). Many poleis tried to rule over neighboring poleis, or reduce rural populations to dependency. Can we even say that all poleis were enslavement societies (even the smallest, with a few hundred citizens)? With many poleis, basic economic structures rested on slavery, and the crucial equality of citizens was based on disenfranchising women, excluding foreigners, exploiting slaves (or at least imagining citizens as non-slaves). In the book, I try to work out how poleis as political forms and social organisms had to deal with these contradictions. Another view is that these distinctions shouldn’t be drawn too sharply, and that in practice, and even in the realm of ideology, there existed a lot more diversity and messiness. I also talk about that in my book: Certainly, lived realities were more complex than just the institutional set-up, but also deeply influenced by law and the state. 

Any lessons from the book that can be applied to current global events, in terms of the moral legacy of the polis, the inclusion of some groups and the exclusion of others?

One of my concerns has long been the history of democratic legitimacy, because when the regime allows for political equality in situations of economic inequality, the tendency is toward redistribution. As I said, it’s an Aristotelian problem, which people at Columbia are familiar with (because undergraduates all study and professors widely teach Aristotle as part of the Core Curriculum—and also because we, of course, all read the work of our colleague Joe Stiglitz).

The problem is that political equality and solidarity, in the polis, are extended to a limited citizen body, imagined in nativist terms as a descent group: Women are excluded from political participation, immigrants have almost no avenues to citizenship, freedom is defined against enslavement. In my book, I call this the “bad polis” and the “worst polis,” even if (as I just mentioned) the realities were complex. Two quotes from the German philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer come to mind: “The presence of the general interest in the particular one, the representation of their harmony, such was the ideal of the Greek city,” and “The democratic state should, in accordance with its idea, be the Greek polis without slaves.”

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, austere, yet for micro-history, it covers everything from ecology to beliefs in the afterworld; Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (volume 2), for the classic study of ancient Greek protocols of sexuality (based on aristocratic restraint—in fact, it could be argued Foucault spends a lot of time just articulating, beautifully, elite self-representation, a problem corrected in the later publication of his lessons at the Collège de France); Michel Reddé’s fantastic study of the economic impact of Roman conquest on the western regions of Gaul, the Rhine border, and Britain: Aux marges de la Gaule.

For fun, I re-read the graphic novellas of Vittorio Giardino on travels and misadventures, gathered in Viaggi, sogni e segreti. I’m currently reading Laurel Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, based on the diary of a midwife in late-18th-century Maine—fascinating for the texture of social and economic history, and full of lessons for ancient history. 

What's next on your reading list?

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, for the history of race in pre-modern times; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, in the hope of an intimate glimpse of urban elites; a novel by Assia Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père.

I also am waiting for Butler Library to get two volumes of a graphic novel series on modern Algeria, Suites algériennes: 1962-2019 by Jacques Ferrandez. (Thanks to Karen Green for acquiring the volumes.)

What are you teaching this semester?

Ancient Greek language (intensive Greek, which promises to be pretty, uh, intense), and a reading course in ancient Greek literature. Next semester, I want to teach a lecture class on the Hellenistic period, the three centuries after the death of Alexander the Great (about 324-31 BCE). It’s an engrossing period that sees increased integration of the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East, political fragmentation, local autonomy, contacts between Greeks and non-Greeks. I’m trying to reorganize and rethink my teaching on this topic, so that I’ll try out a few new things. 

Which three scholars/classicists, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

Mikhail Rostovtzeff (1870-1952), a Russian immigrant to the U.S., where he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale University, an extraordinary historian of the Hellenistic world, unequalled in his interest in material culture (also, by the sound of it, a hard-drinking bon vivant).

Adolf Wilhelm (1864-1950), the Austrian philologist and epigrapher—because of his work, which reached exacting standards, but also because of his life in the fascinating context of modern Athens, where he had a happy and productive time, traveling in Greece and Turkey, writing and speaking modern Greek with gusto.

Finally, the French archaeologist Fanette Laubenheimer, on whose site, Sallèles-d’Aude, I worked as a volunteer excavator when I was a teenager interested in classical antiquity. I was inspired by her work on this site—using the evidence from ancient amphoras to reconstruct the history of early wine-making and consumption habits in Gaul. I’ve followed her research ever since, and want to read her book on drinking habits in ancient Gaul, Boire en Gaule. I discovered online that she is the descendant of a family of German brewers, who owned a brewery-cum-beer-hall (brasserie) in southwestern France!