The Formation of Greek City-States: Status, Class, and Land Tenure Systems

Abstract

Recent scholarship has often remarked on the opposition between two conceptions of Archaic Greek societies, relating either to a legal and static definition of status or to a notion of status as personal and fluid, linked to diversified strategies for obtaining social distinction. This article seeks to move beyond this opposition by examining the history of status groups in the Archaic period. After analyzing the key stages within the complex historiography devoted to this subject, it goes on to provide a history of status groups during the formative period of the city-states. The creation of new status groups was an essential feature of the city-states’ history and was primarily linked to indebtedness and war. Although statuses were collective and often imposed from the outside, they nevertheless display a historical development that is central to the formation of city-states. In the seventh century BCE, new groups were created in response to the aristocracy’s need for a workforce. The resulting conflict led to an evolution of the systems regulating access to land and food. This reorganization of entitlement, which was how communities responded to the social and economic crisis they faced, was in turn based on the creation of new status groups. Social conflict led to the definition of a new system of status groups.

A Brief Overview of the Political Economy of Ancient Greek Polis and Demokratia

“…Greater egalitarian principles could also be seen in war itself: The phalanx was indeed a particular method of fighting, relying on individual courage and group cohesion, as opposed to heroic duels, the form of combat displayed in Homeric texts. Archaic Greek society remained nevertheless strongly status-based, with some prominent aristocrats (Zurbach, 2013). This effective equality in combat, which was not necessarily reflected in political participation, led to tensions between the hoplites and the aristocrats.…”

Rural hinterlands of the Black Sea during the fourth century BCE: expansion, intensification and new connections

“…Key questions have revolved around the polis/chora nexus: the process of territorial definition of the chora; the nature of agricultural exploitation and labour; and the relationship of the chora to the urban centre of the polis (Osborne 1987;Alcock et al 1994;Morris 2005;Bintliff 2006). More recently, focus has shifted to the political significance of the chora and the ways in which land tenure related to the definition of political status (for example Zurbach 2013).…”

(De)constructing Politeia: Reflections on Citizenship and the Bestowal of Privileges upon Foreigners in Hellenistic Democracies

“…to show that "legal and political divisions constituted ancient Greek society's infrastructure, [and] politics functioned as a relation of production." 4 In doing so, Zurbach strongly opposes a particular fringe of historical anthropology for which "the problem of status tend[s] to give way to the question of how a community is united and cemented," 5 currently exemplified, in his opinion, by the notion of social performance employed by Alain Duplouy in his work on the elite of the Archaic period. 6 Duplouy seeks to demonstrate how the social hierarchy of this period was constructed "to a certain extent outside of legal statuses."…”