For most historians the characteristic and peculiar element in Greek political life has been the polis, the city-state, an institution of which any precise definition obscures the variety in size or shape or social and
political organization. Very roughly, it was a community of citizens (adult males), citizens without political rights (women and children), and non-citizens (resident foreigners and slaves), a defined body,
occupying a defined area, living under a defined or definable constitution, independent of outside authority to an extent that allowed enough of its members to feel that they were independent. The land at large
may have been virtually empty of residents or occupied by farmhouses or villages or even small towns, but there had to be one focal point, religious, political, administrative, around which usually grew up
(Sparta was a notable exception) a city, the polis proper, usually fortified, always offering a market (an agora), a place of assembly (often the agora itself), a seat of justice and of government, executive and
deliberative, in the early period monarchic or aristocratic in type, later usually oligarchic or democratic.
The physical base was almost essential, but even more so was the sense of community. 'We Athenians have a city so long as we have our ships', Themistocles was to say at Salamis (below, p. 45). So too the
notion of independence. Some part of it could be shed involuntarily, by acceptance of tribute-paying to a stronger power, or voluntarily, by joining an alliance or even a federation (the Thessalian or Boeotian,
for instance), but a sense of 'autonomy' had to be there. This institution at its best, the ancient theorists argued, should be neither too large nor too small, neither too self-sufficient nor too dependent, neither too
oligarchic nor too democratic. Certainly, for the archaic and classical periods, most historians have been right to regard the polis as the characteristic form of political organization; certainly, too, many poleis
approached somewhere near the happy norm. But recent enquiries have drawn attention to two other factors which in earlier years will somehow have influenced the origins of the city and may have continued
for some time to colour its development.
The first of these is the repopulation of large tracts of the Greek countryside after the collapse of Mycenaean society. The immediate consequence of this collapse was a long period of chaotic tribal wandering
which by about 1000 B.C. had set the pattern for the future: Dorians, newcomers from the north, in most of the Peloponnese, Crete, south-west Asia Minor and its offshore islands; Ionians in Attica, Euboea,
most of the Aegean islands, and on the central coast of Asia Minor; in the north, in Lesbos, and north-west Asia Minor a mixture which we may roughly call Aeolian. But at the start most of the settlements were
small nuclei with much land around them left to occupy.
The second factor is the appearance of associations of communities, clearly linked with, but not necessarily in all respects coterminous with, this repopulation. Greek tradition hands on several examples of such
associations, some mere hazy recollections, some surviving as more or less empty religious institutions, some few surfacing occasionally in later political life. The six Dorian cities of south-west Asia Minor; the
twelve Ionian states to the north, capable once of concerted action in the 'Meliac' war, too far away in time to be properly recalled; the amphictyony (a league of neighbours) of Anthela at Thermopylae which
owed survival and prosperity to its association with the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. Except in the last case, however, vagueness of information has tended to divert attention to more solid things, to Athens,
Sparta, Corinth, to real city-states.
But excavations of the last decade or so awaken interest and prompt a new perception. There existed archaeologically in central Greece an area of common culture: southern Thessaly, Boeotia, Euboea, and the
islands around its eastern coast, an area which has been given new focus by the discovery of a major settlement at Lefkandi on the west coast of Euboea, half-way between what have hitherto been regarded as
the island's two main cities, Chalcis and Eretria. Stunningly prosperous (by contemporary standards) throughout the Dark Age, say 1 1oo to 750, it appears to have reached a height of wealth in the late ninth
century, but more than a century earlier it could offer the tomb of a hero, buried with his consort and with his horses, of unparalleled grandeur and wealth. On available archaeological evidence Lefkandi was the
core of the wider community. Was it also the religious core? It is tempting to say that it was not, to think rather of Thermopylae some 60 miles to the north across the narrow water, the site of the amphictyony
which, it was said, originally included precisely those same peoples, Thessalians, Boeotians, the smaller tribes between them and the Ionians, no doubt the Ionians of Euboea. Did it, or Thermopylae, provide
any kind of political core? Who knows? But stories or hints of early collaboration, commercial and military, between various parts of the area, read against the firm archaeological background and with the
likelihood of some religious association, argue for some much greater degree of cohesion than has previously been countenanced.