From antiquity until the nineteenth century, there have been two types of state: macro-states, each dotted with a number of cities, and regions broken up into city-states, each consisting of an urban center and its hinterland. A region settled with interacting city-states constituted a city-state culture and Polis opens with a description of the concepts of city, state, city-state, and city-state culture, and a survey of the 37 city-state cultures so far identified. Mogens Herman Hansen provides a thoroughly accessible introduction to the polis (plural: poleis), or ancient Greek city-state, which represents by far the largest of all city-state cultures. He addresses such topics as the emergence of the polis, its size and population, and its political organization, ranging from famous poleis such as Athens and Sparta through more than 1,000 known examples.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA Pub. Date: 30th November 2006 Catalog: Book Media: Paperback Number Of Pages: 246 Ean: 9780199208500 Isbn: 0199208506
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Authoritative approach in brief ~ Written on Dec 24, 2008. 5 out of 5 users found this review helpful.
Prof. Hansen is the current leading world authority in the studies on the Greek polis, having founded the Copenhagen Polis Centre and published a wide variety of books and papers on the subject. On this book, he discusses the philological aspects of the word polis and its implications, such as the use of the translated term "City-State", and the political, social and cultural traits that define the polis as a particular institutional entity in the Ancient world.
This book is a very dense, though short, synopsis of his work so far, and a very welcoming addition to the introductory studies of the Greek world. The chapters are quite small and schematic, so maybe the book could have been a bit longer in order to develop the arguments more thoroughly, but this is no hindrance for understanding the text.
This is a recommended introduction to the work of the "Copenhagen School" about the polis, since some of their studies are not easily available.
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