38 Polıteía
Nor even the carpenter’s art
Can make a pólıs.
But where there are men
Who know how to preserve themselves
There one finds walls and a city as well.^5Because they shared the poet’s conviction, the Hellenes never spoke in an
abstract way of the deeds of Athens, Corinth, Megara, and Lacedaemon. These
were places, not polities. As the public inscriptions assert, the real actors were
the Athenians, the Corinthians, the Megarians, and the Lacedaemonians. The
people wielded the power, and they constituted both state and society wrapped
up in one. With only trivial exceptions, the Greek cities had no bureaucracies,
no magistrates blessed with long tenure, no professional armies. It was futile
to try to distinguish the governors from the governed; the pólis itself depended
on the identity of soldier and civilian; and the farmer had the right to own
land solely by virtue of his status as a citizen.^6 The differentiation of roles which
the distinction between state and society presupposes simply did not exist. In
principle and to a substantial degree in practice, the citizen body was homo-
geneous and self-governing.^7
Just as there was no Greek state, so there was no civil society with which
it could interact. The city was, as Aristotle argued, a political community
[koınōnía]: it was a Gemeinschaft, not a Gesellschaft.^8 The pólis was not a con-
spiracy of self-seeking individuals joined for mutual profit and protection in
a temporary legal partnership that would be dissolved when it ceased to suit
their interests; it was a moral community of men permanently united as a
people by a common way of life. As a human being, the Greek possessed no
rights against the commonwealth; as a citizen, he might demand and be
granted certain privileges—but these would be more than outweighed by his
duties to the community at large. Here, as is often the case, language is the
shadow of political reality: it is by no means fortuitous that the English word
idiot is derivative from the Greek term employed to designate those who pre-
ferred private pleasure to public endeavor. Because they were shirkers who
took what the city had to offer and gave little or nothing in return, men of this
stripe incurred scorn and ill will. In short, the peculiar division between a
narrow public and a broad private realm characteristic of bourgeois regimes
was utterly alien to the Greek experience. The civic community’s claim was, in
principle, total: only the oîkos proved capable of resisting absorption; and, as
we have seen, this was solely because the city depended on the preservation of