Conclusion

The traditional view that the Greek polls was, "by definition," an independent and individualistic city-state has distorted our understanding of the function of the polis in the Hellenistic world. It has been widely admitted that Philip II and Alexander the Great were responsible for the decline and fall of the polis, that the polls ceased to be the frame in which Greek civilization achieved its perfection. It has even been said that after Chaeronea the Greek polis no longer existed and that the Greek ceased to be a citizen of his city and became a citizen of the world.

The available material, especially the inscriptions, reveals that the polls was, first of all, a "partnership in living well," a community of a particular kind involving a specifically Greek way of living together. And it appears that in the Hellenistic period the polis preserved its identity better than ever. The gymnasium and the theater, which concretized this identity, became more and more the symbols of the Greek education of

body and mind, of the superiority of Greek culture and the Greek way of life. They differentiated the Greeks from other people, from the Jews, the Egyptians, or the Syrians.

But the polis had another, no less important function: it was the link between individual citizens and the Greek commonwealth as a whole. For the Greeks were not members of the Greek commonwealth as individuals, they belonged to it as members of a Greek polis. It was the function of the polis to create and entertain relations of friendship and solidarity with other poleis, it was its function to send official delegations to the great panhellenic festivals. The poleis were the subjects of what I called interhellenic relations. And this network of interhellenic relations between cities made of the Greek world a community of communities, a homogeneous society of poleis.

The scholars who have shown some interest in this network of relationships between cities and cities in the Hellenistic period consider this "overture" of the polis to the outside world to be the result of the political decline of Greece after Chaeronea. They think that the Greek cities discovered, at last, "the consciousness of their unity and solidarity, of the existence of vital common interests among them," that "Greek 'political' exclusiveness gradually gave way to a broader conception, of a kind of brotherhood among all who were entitled to call themselves 'Hellenes.'"^[74]

This belief results from the evidence we have. Our knowledge of the ties of friendship and solidarity among cities depends mainly, and for some aspects almost exclusively, on the inscriptions. The literary sources, historians, orators, and philosophers, are not particularly concerned with the everyday life of the average polis and mention only incidentally these kinds of peaceful and—in a certain sense—banal relations. Since the epigraphical material is rather scanty for the Classical period and totally nonexistent for the Archaic, it is finally the lack of information that explains the common view that there was no or only very little solidarity among the Greek communities before Alexander.

But, despite the limitations of our evidence, we have in the literary sources some indications that this solidarity already existed in the Classical period and even before. We find in Herodotus several examples of solidarity which are quite similar to those attested by the inscriptions for the Hellenistic period. It was in recognition of old benefits that Sparta and Corinth came to the aid of the Samians against Polycrates (Her. 3.47-48). The Eretrians sent assistance to the Milesians for similar reasons (5.99). The Spartans had granted the Attic deme of Deceleia ateleia

[74] Rostovtzeff, SEHHW 2:1109.

and proedria in acknowledgment of a—mythical—benefit of the Deceleians at the time of the Trojan War (9.73.3). The Milesians were bound together by a tie of reciprocal hospitality with Sybaris and decreed a public mourning at the fall of this city (6.21). The Milesians asked the Parians to send them their best citizens to settle their internal conflicts, an interesting precedent for the practice of calling foreign judges (5.28). The kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech and the likeness of their way of life asserted by Herodotus in a famous statement (8.144.2) was not an idealistic proclamation of faith, it expressed the fact that, despite their quarrels and disputes, the Greek poleis already in early times constituted a commonwealth of communities bound together by an intense system of relationships.

In fact, the homogeneity of the Greek world with its network of friendships goes back to the times of Homer, with the essential difference, however, that the world of Homer is a world of individuals, not a world of cities.^[75] The Homeric heroes are bound together by the consciousness of a common origin (they are all offspring of Zeus), by ties of hospitality and intermarriage. They pay visits to each other. They exchange gifts and countergifts. They help each other in cases of necessity for common undertakings. They practice athletics in common and listen to the rhapsodes who sing about the heroes of the past. The unity of the Greek world is a creation of the Dark Ages.

The rise of the polis in the seventh and sixth centuries did not destroy this system of personal relationships, which survived through the Archaic and the Classical periods.^[76] But the polis, the community, progressively superseded the individual as the subject of these relations. The poleis established with each other relationships that were of the same kind and were based on the same principles as the personal ties of Homeric society. Thus, we find in Herodotus cities bound to other cities or to kings by ties of hospitality , which, in a typically Homeric way, are concretized by exchanges of gifts and countergifts: for instance, Sparta with Croesus, with Amasis, and with the Samians (Her. 1.69-70 and 3.47). The privileges granted by the Spartans to the Deceleians, because these had revealed to the Dioscuri the place where their sister

[75] See M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus , 2d ed. (London, 1977). I share the opinion of A. Lesky, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur , 3d ed. (Bern and Munich, 1971), 73ff., that Homer essentially reflects the society and values of his own time (the problem of the "historicity" of the Trojan War is, of course, quite another question).

[76] See the interesting book by G. Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Creek City (Cambridge, 1987), and the remarkable, but unfortunately little known, article of A. Heuss, "Die archaische Zeit Griechenlands als geschichtliche Epoche," A&A 2 (1946): 26-62 (reprinted in Zur griechischen Staatskunde , ed. F. Gschnitzer, WdF 96 (Darmstadt, 1969), 36-96, at 68ff. (the best pages I know on Archaic tyranny).

Helen was hidden, are another nice illustration of this evolution. The consciousness of unity and solidarity among all Greeks is not a late discovery of the Hellenistic period: it is a direct inheritance from Homeric society; it is the result of the progressive transformation of a society of individual aristocrats into a society of poleis.

The rise of the polis is the victory of the community over the individual, the family, and the clan.^[77] The life of most Greek cities was a constant fight for survival and independence, a fight against neighbors for land or for cattle, a fight against ambitious powers or against rivals; but it was not a fight against the unity of the Greek commonwealth as such. There was no incompatibility between political independence from neighbors and from hegemonic powers on the one hand, and solidarity with the Greek world on the other. The cities inherited from Homeric society the consciousness that all together, whether large or small, were related to each other by a common origin, a common way of life, and a common destiny. And despite their conflicts and wars, they were able to keep the unity of the Greek commonwealth throughout their history. The totally individualistic poleis, living in splendid isolation and caring nothing for one another, like the Cyclopes in their caves, never did exist.

[77] See Glotz, Cité grecque , 5: "En réalité, la cité grecque, tout en conservant l'institution familiale, n'a pu grandir qu'à ses dépens. . . . La cité a dû longtemps lutter contre le génos, et chacune de ses victoires a été obtenue par la suppression d'une servitude patriarcale." See also Heuss, "Archaische Zeit Griechenlands," 57ff.