Graham Shipley, University of Leicester, on CPC Acts 1-6, CPC Papers 1-5, and 30 CSC

Reproduced with permission from Journal of Hellenic Studies 123 (2003) 235-237

[for JHS, see the website of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies]

Disclaimer: the reviewer is a contributor to CPC Acts 4 and to forthcoming publications of the Copenhagen Polis Centre project. This review therefore takes the form of an overall account of the CPC's output rather than an evaluative assessment. Where I do express or imply a judgement, readers must verify it themselves. Only two volumes, Acts 3 and Papers 3, have previously been reviewed in JHS 117 (1997) 236-8, by P.J. Rhodes, himself a contributor to CPC Acts 7 and 2.

The prolific output of the Copenhagen Polis Centre is testimony not only to the generosity of its funding bodies and the enthusiasm of its director, Mogens Herman Hansen, but also to one of the most successful international collaborations in the study of the classical world. To date, some fifty scholars from Europe and North America have contributed papers to the two main series: Acts, deriving from symposia, and Papers (hereinafter Papers), presenting related studies. A similar range of authors has contributed to the massive Inventory of Poleis in the Archaic and Classical Periods, to be published by Oxford University Press, which will draw together the results of a decade's research into each region of the Greek world before c. 300 BC.
Thirty-two new contributors, including several from Asia and Africa, feature alongside the CPC 'home side' in Thirty City-state Cultures. This covers the ancient world from the Levant via Greece and Rome to the Celts and Mecca; medieval and early modern Europe from Viking Ireland and Russia to the Dutch republic; southern Asia, including China and India; African cultures from Algeria to Kenya to the Niger basin; and the Maya, Mixtec and Aztec city-states of Mesoamerica. H.'s synthetic essays on 'The concepts of city-state and city-state culture', 'The Hellenic polis', and 'The impact of city-state cultures on world history' sum up the main debates and should be read by all ancient historians as well as urban historians of any period.
While the two main series are well printed, Thirty City-state Cultures stands out in terms of its production and illustrations. Although all twelve volumes, especially Acts 5, are cheap in relation to their size, they are currently (August 2002) not listed by the main internet booksellers and are more easily ordered from 'terrestrial' booksellers or the publishers' websites.
For the Greek world, the project has foregrounded regional variations in political forms and settlement structures such as were highlighted in H.-J. Gehrke, Jenseits von Athen und Sparta (1986). At the same time, H.'s team has elucidated some of the basic principles of terminology and organization concerning the Classical polis, and has made these part of everyday discussion wherever research and teaching in ancient history take place.
The opening symposium (Acts 1) includes period-based surveys by Snodgrass (Geometric), Raaflaub (Archaic), Gauthier (Hellenistic) and Millar (Roman). Specialist studies are devoted to supra-polis structures such as hegemonic and federal associations (Rhodes, Acts 1; Schuller and Dreher, Acts 2; Avram, Papers 2), coinage (Martin. Acts 2). Although archaeology is not the main focus of the CPC's remit, architectural features and urban form receive extensive treatment (H. and Fischer-Hansen on political architecture, Papers 1; Miller and Shear on Athens, Papers 2; Miller and Ducrey, Acts 2; H., Morgan and Coulton on the general question, Acts 4; Greaves on Miletos, Papers 5). polis religion is examined from several angles (Perlman and Cole, Acts 2; de Polignac and Burkert, Papers 2; Schachter, Papers 5). Several themes are also illustrated in the extensive list of regionally based studies (below).
Key authors, both Classical and later, are scrutinized for what they tell us about the nature of the Classical polis. Historians, orators, inscriptions and Archaic and Classical sources are treated synoptically (H., Nielsen and Flensted-Jensen, Papers 5; decrees additionally by Rhodes, Acts 2). Pausanias (Alcock, Acts 2; Rubinstein, Papers 2) and Xenophon (Nielsen, Papers 2 and 5) are brought sharply into focus. Less familiar sources are rehabilitated, such as Hekataios (H., Papers 4), the fourth-century Periplous of Pseudo-Skylax (Flensted-Jensen and H., Papers 3), and, from the other end of antiquity, the surviving epitome of Stephanos of Byzantion's Ethnika (Whitehead, Papers 1). The observations of ancient philosophers are taken into account (Schofield and Ober, Acts 1).
The remaining oeuvre of the CPC is characterized by a number of recurrent themes which have an important bearing on the theory of Greek states and politics. Fundamental emphases include the denotations and connotations of the term polis (see especially Acts 5) and how it should be translated ('city-state' gets the vote), the polis as a state and community (Schuller and Ober, Acts 1; Fraser, Acts 2; Murray, Acts 4), and types of poleis such as emporia (H., Papers 4). The essential tenets of the project (outlined more fully by Rhodes in his review) owe much to the inspiration of H. himself. They are founded primarily on extensive yet close attention to the actual usage of the ancient Greeks. They thus represent a strong current within that flood-tide of scholarship that voraciously exploits the new electronic search facilities, notably the TLG and PHI databases, in order to pronounce authoritatively about the Greeks' use of their language. Sources post-dating c. 300 BC are excluded from any attempt to pronounce about Greek notions of the polis in the Classical period. Generalizations advanced by H. and his colleagues thus have the firmest possible foundation in the evidence, while of course not ignoring issues of rhetoric, manipulation of language and variability of meaning. Some of these generalizations appear to have taken scholarship by surprise. For example, it is shown, on the basis of rigorous statistical treatment, that the use of an ethnic (ethnikon) to denote a member of an urban community (e.g. Athenaios, Lakedaimonios) is a fairly reliable indicator that a place would have been called a polis (H., Papers 3; on ethnic identity see also Walbank, Papers 5).
Second, the association between autonomos, autonomia and their cognates on the one hand, and polis on the other has been clarified (e.g. H., Papers 2). Autonomia in the Classical period generally referred to independence or freedom for a polis. It thus had stronger connotations than anglophone scholars would give to 'autonomy', which can mean simply local jurisdiction exercised by a subordinate political authority over certain matters only.
Third, actual uses of the term polis in ancient texts show that it can mean (1) a political entity, the 'city-state', (2) a physical entity, the town, or less commonly (3) a territory or homeland. From related observations, H. has derived a generalization he has whimsically dubbed the lex Hafniensis de civitate, or Copenhagen Law of the City-state. This amounts to the statement that, in Archaic and Classical writings (with some poetic exceptions), polis is applied to a named Greek urban entity only if it was also politically organized as a city-state (see H., Papers 1 and 4 and esp. Acts 3, 33). As a corollary, historians may need to broaden their own use of the term polis. If Greek writers applied it to extremely small communities, we must be willing to accept the implications unreservedly: it was usually no mere metaphor or extension of the term, even if we might hesitate to call such places 'cities' in a modern, human-geographical sense. We must recognize that it was natural to the Greeks to apply the term polis to a certain kind of community with a certain physical setting, irrespective of its size.
Next, and related to the last two points, the project has identified an important type of lower-order community, the 'dependent polis' (e.g. H., Papers 4), of which various forms are observed in many parts of the Greek world. Until recently, anglophone scholars were reluctant (despite the sources) to recognize the applicability of the terms polis and city-state to communities that were not wholly free – as if Aristotle's type of the autarkic and independent polis was a description of actual usage rather than an ideal. This insight represents another broadening of the term polis in line with ancient thought.
The meaning of kome has also been elucidated (see, e.g., H., Papers 2). Except in special cases it does not usually refer to a political subdivision of a polis, but is a flexible term denoting a small-scale settlement, whether a polis or not.
These and other methodological and theoretical points are complemented by many detailed regional studies illustrating both similarities and variations between Greek societies. Areas covered (not descriptively but usually with thematic focuses such as the dependent polis or urbanization) include the Aegean islands (Reger, Acts 4), Aitolia (Funke, Acts 4), Boiotia (H., Acts 2 and 3; Keen and H., Papers 3), the Bosporos and Black Sea (Avram, Acts 3; Tsetskhladze and Hind, Papers 4), Chalkidike (Flensted-Jensen, Papers 2, 4 and 5), Crete (Perlman, Acts 3), Cyprus (Demand, Papers 3), Egypt (Bowden, Papers 3), Euboia (Knoepfler, Acts 4), Italy and Sicily (Fischer-Hansen, Acts 3), and Lokris (Nielsen, Papers 5). The Peloponnese features strongly, with studies devoted to Achaia (Morgan and Hall, Acts 3), the Argolid (Piérart, Acts 4), Arkadia (Nielsen, Papers 2 and Acts 3; Forsén and Forsén, Papers 4 and 5; Roy and Nielsen, Papers 3 and, with nine collaborators, the whole of Acts 6), Elis (Roy, Acts 4), Laconia (Shipley, Acts 4; Hall, Papers 5), and Triphylia (Nielsen, Papers 4). Archaeological and epigraphic evidence are to fore, and the resulting syntheses often represent a breakthrough in the understanding of Greek regional landscapes, their political organization, and its expression through settlement, religion and culture.
It would be wrong to see the work of the CPC as a mere exercise in classification. The methodological positions adopted (by no means uncritically or uniformly) by H.'s collaborators go to the heart of what we believe the Archaic and Classical Greek city-state to have been like. Not all Greeks lived in poleis, but all lived in a world influenced, for good or ill, by the polis. As Rhodes remarked in his review, 'What is a polis?' is only one of the important questions: 'what needs to be studied is the whole range of Greek civic institutions in all its subtlety and variety' (238). The published and forthcoming publications of the Copenhagen Polis Centre will be invaluable for the fulfilment of this aspiration.