Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Historical Outline 17
earlier, it is the lives of the politai, or citizens of the city-states, who
will be the primary focus.
The polis system flourished throughout the Greek-speaking
world. It has been estimated that there were as many as 1,500 separate
political communities dotted around the islands and shores of
the eastern Mediterranean, along the southern shore of the Black
Sea, in eastern Sicily and southern Italy, and further west, on
the southern coast of France and on the eastern coast of Spain. It
proved to be a remarkably resilient and flexible entity. Even after
the Greeks had lost their independence, first to Macedon and later
to Rome, the Greek city-states continued to flourish. Their success
over such a long period of time was due in part to the inherent
particularism of the Greeks—their preference, that is, for living in
politically independent communities.
It is for this reason that the notion of “Greekness” was largely
confined to the linguistic, religious, and social spheres. As a political
concept, it amounted to very little. Though the Greeks shared
a common language, common social structures, and a common
religion, in other respects they observed little sense of unity. Only
when faced with an external threat, as at the time of the Persian
invasion, did they temporarily succeed in forming an alliance and
implementing a joint strategy. Most Greeks thought of themselves
as Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians, and Thebans first, and Greeks
a distant second. And that remained true as well when they fell
under the sway of Rome. It is why they only coalesced into a military
force at moments of crisis. Even so, the cohesiveness of that
alliance was constantly being undermined by the competing interests
of its different members. The strains upon such coalitions can
be seen in the first book of The Iliad, where Achilles calls into question
the military capability of Agamemnon, the commander in chief
of the Greek expeditionary force to Troy, and threatens to return
home.
COLONIZATION
The period from about 730 to 580 b.c.e. witnessed an enormous
expansion of Greek civilization through the medium of colonization.
This was made possible by a power vacuum in the Mediterranean,
because the two most important states in the previous
era, Egypt and Phoenicia, were both in decline and no other state
presented a serious obstacle to Greek outreach. The influence
of the Near East on Greek culture, which came about as a direct