The Polis as the Basic Social Unit

The analyses of human society in Sophokles’ Antigone and Plato’s Protagoras both begin with the means of material production, but both explicitly emphasize that society consists of more than material production. For Sophokles, Plato, and almost certainly Protagoras, the polis is the crowning achievement of human social evolution. The hundreds of city-states scattered throughout the Mediterranean provided more-or-less autonomous societies for their citizens. Both Sophokles and Plato take the polis as the basic, ideal unit for human society.

The first three strophes of the chorus at Antigone 334–364 focus on humanity’s ability to dominate nature, but the climax of the chorus focuses on society itself. Whoever maintains the laws of the land (Ant. 367–368: nomoi chthonos) and the “sworn justice of the gods” (369: chthonos theôn t’ enorchon dikan) has a lofty polis (370: hupsipolis). Whoever seeks what is ignoble (370: to mê kalon) has no polis at all (apolis) and is excluded from any hearth in the community (372). Whatever humans can produce, they are nothing outside of the framework provided by the polis.

The Protagoras draws the distinction between material and social aspects of life even more explicitly. From the start Plato makes the technical skill stolen by Prometheus a second-best gift—Prometheus enters the house of Athena and Hephaistos only because he cannot evade the guards who watch over Zeus’s home (Prt. 321d). Once mortals possessed this skill, they went about building altars and offering dedications to the gods. Then, after acquiring language, they created for themselves “dwelling places, clothes, footgear, places to sleep, and food from the soil” (322a). This material progress—which encompassed those skills conventionally viewed as necessary for the physical maintenance of life—was only a beginning, and a poor one at that. Human beings lived scattered about (322b: sporadên), and poleis did not exist. Although human beings could produce what they needed, individually they could not ward off the depredations of wild beasts, and so they banded together, founding poleis for their own preservation. But this expedient served only to replace one set of problems with another. People living together but “lacking the skill necessary for a polis” (ouk echontes tên politikên technên) now began to wrong one another. They left these imperfect communities and began again to perish (skedannumenoi diephtheironto) (Prt. 322b). Only the institution of dikê, “justice,” saved humans in the end and permitted them to live in the polis communities necessary to their survival.

A citizen of and long-time exile from Athens, descendant of Thracian kings, and, as an exile in midst of the Peloponnesian War, comfortable with Greeks from any state, whether friend or foe of Athens (Thuc. 5.26.5), Thucydides does not present the polis as a triumphant and climactic social formation. Thucydides starts his analysis with Hellas as a whole, not with any particular polis (1.2.1: phainetai gar hê nûn Hellas kaloumenê). Early Greece was weak because there was no seaborne trade and because individuals could not safely travel by land or by sea (1.2.2). One could see the “weakness of ancient times” (1.3.1: tôn palaiôn astheneia) in lack of common action on the part of the Greeks before the Trojan War (1.3.2). Until recently, in fact, they did not even call themselves Hellenes. Here, Thucydides cites Homer, “who lived long after the Trojan War…and calls them in his poetry Danaans, Argives, and Achaians, but not collectively Hellenes” (1.3.3). Concepts such as “Hellas” and “Hellene” had not emerged, because no clear line yet divided barbarian from Greek. The Greeks had not yet begun to define themselves as a separate group, and Thucydides spends some time at 1.6 explaining that Hellenic culture was a relatively recent product.

As far as Thucydides was concerned, the polis was not the product of an evolutionary process that began in the eighth century; it was instead the primeval unit of Greek society. Thucydides calls the groups that preyed upon one another and thus never grew strong poleis, not ethnê or some other name.^[38] Where Plato’s Protagoras describes people preying upon one another within the polis, Thucydides opens his spectacle of history with organized groups driving each other from their homes (Thuc. 1.2.1). Agricultural wealth in individual states served to increase the risk of stasis or of external invasion (1.2.4). Attika prospered only because its low-quality soil rendered it a poor prize (1.2.5), and the victims of stasis or war took refuge there (1.2.6). The scattered Greek states were capable of little individually: “weakness and lack of contact with each other” (1.3.4: astheneia kai ameixia allêlôn) prevented them from accomplishing anything.

If other accounts emphasize the polis governed by dikê, Thucydides counters with his poleis restrained by force from devouring one another. Against the harsh and dangerous landscape of 1.1.2, Thucydides sets Minos, whose naval forces controlled the Aegean sea by force, who exerted imperial power (Thuc. 1.4: archê), and who became the personal founder, the oikistês, of most of the islands, drove out the Karian inhabitants, and placed his own sons in charge of the new societies (see also 1.8.2). Without such an iron hand, international anarchy reigned, and piracy flourished: since poleis lacked walls and were dispersed into small villages, those who were armed easily extracted their livelihood from plunder (1.5.1). Worst of all, they felt no shame at such behavior. Thucydides maliciously points to the manner in which speakers pose the question “Are you pirates?”—as if those who are asked the question would have no idea of disclaiming the imputation, or their interrogators of reproaching them for it (1.5.2). The scorn for those who are unashamed at their piracy illustrates better, perhaps, than any other passage that Thucydides did not view interstate relations as “amoral.” ^[39] People continued to live in their separate poleis, but, under the protection of imperial control, they were able to accumulate wealth and even to develop walls and other resources whereby to defend themselves more effectively (1.8.3). Indeed, it was only because Minos had used his authoritarian rule to instill some initial organization in the Greek world that the Greeks had the means whereby to conduct the Trojan War at all (1.8.4).

Unlike Sophokles, Protagoras, or Plato, Thucydides did not see in the independent polis a viable social unit (an opinion that fourth-century history might seem to confirm). The force majeure of archê is, in the final analysis, necessary if states are not to degenerate into impoverished and fearful chaos.