To the casual educated observer, there might seem little to be gained from revisiting the history of the ancient Greek city-states. This is a well-plowed field, and there would seem little reason for thinking new evidence has emerged that could change in any fundamental way how that history is understood by scholars or others today. It’s true that this period in world history holds an interest for us moderns that is unusual, indeed unique. Everybody knows that Athens was the first democracy, and the emergence there of something resembling democracy as we know it will always seem something of a miracle. On the other hand, should we look too closely under the Athenian rock, we may think again, for there can be no denying that for all the individual genius and cultural splendor of that remarkable people, the Athenians were also imperialist bullies, slaveholders, and male chauvinists. 

Yet, it is not true, however, that no new evidence has come to light in recent years that potentially alters our understanding of classical antiquity. Archeological investigations of the ancient world, from prehistory to the end of the Roman Empire, continue to extend their reach and increase exponentially in technological sophistication. As for the history of the Greek polis, perhaps the most significant development has been the aggregation of literary and material data by Mogens Herman Hansen and collaborators in An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004). This catalogue includes, amazingly, over 1,100 entries. 

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To my mind, the most significant advances in our understanding of the polis have come from archeologically informed research on Greek “federal states”—several autonomous city-states (poleis) united together often for a common defense. It is hard to overstate the potential implications this has not only for the history but also for the very concept of the polis as a distinctive political form—not to mention its obvious relevance to the American republic. (John Adams made a close study of these Greek confederacies in his erudite survey of past constitutions, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, drawing mainly on the Greek historian Polybius.) The pioneering work of modern scholarship in this area is J.A.O. Larsen’s Greek Federal States: Their Institutions and History (1968), building on his earlier and equally eye-opening Representative Government in Greek and Roman History (1955). An updated version of Larsen, long overdue, has recently appeared in Federalism in Greek Antiquity, edited by Hans Beck and Peter Funke (2015). Part of the reason for the neglect of this highly interesting subject is that the period of the flourishing of Greek federal states occurred later than the flourishing of the canonical poleis of the 5th century—though even then it had an important presence in the form of the Boeotian Confederation. But much also is accounted for simply by the underrepresentation of these states in the literary record. This is why the recent archeological evidence takes on such importance.  

Apart from archeology, it is important to appreciate how the tools provided by modern social science can help make sense of a historical record that is at best fragmented and incomplete, at worst contradictory and laden with political and ideological biases. As long ago as the 19th century, historians began to try to understand the evolution of the classical polis through the lens of anthropology and historical sociology; a useful account is S.C. Humphreys’s Anthropology and the Greeks (1978). Important studies of the ancient economy from a modern perspective have been carried out by Karl Polanyi and M.I. Finley, building again on 19th-century predecessors. Conventional histories of the period were forcefully challenged in G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s Marxist tome, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981). In recent path-breaking studies, Josiah Ober has analyzed the role of ideology in classical democratic politics in Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989) and the surprising dynamism of the ancient Greek economy in The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015). 

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What does John Ma’s Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity add to this impressive literature? The answer, sad to say, is virtually nothing.  

In fact, it is worse than that. A professor of classics at Columbia University, Ma obliterates the very memory of this older literature, either simply ignoring it or submerging it in a fog of fashionable academic jargon and bad writing, while pretending he has somehow produced a grand synthesis of all existing scholarship on the subject. He fosters this illusion by pummeling the reader with bits and pieces of archeological findings from every corner of the Greek world, few of which seem particularly significant in themselves and, at least to an uninitiated reader, offer little basis for any grand new interpretation.  

A few salient illustrations will have to suffice. Anyone approaching this subject with a clean slate would have to begin by raising the question: what did the Greeks themselves think about the polis? Now it happens that one of the greatest Greek thinkers of the day, Aristotle, wrote a treatise, the Politics, which discusses the phenomenon of the polis in its various dimensions, with many historical examples but also in a theoretical framework that still qualifies it as a foundational work of political science for students of the subject today. What does Ma say about him? Apart from a scattering of casual references, Ma never attempts to analyze how Aristotle defines the polis, how he distinguishes it from other forms of political or pre-political society, or how he defines or treats the various forms of government (including democracy, about which Aristotle has a great deal to say, or oligarchy and aristocracy, which Ma conflates in a hopeless muddle throughout the book). Ma acknowledges that the Politics is “an invaluable witness,” then goes on to shower it with faint praise:

It is true that some of the terms of the debates and conversations in Aristotle’s ragbag, seminar-like text are still influenced by the elite-centered and oligarchical questions raised during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE: Aristotle was still a man of his class (wealthy, elitist). Such hoary questions (taken a bit too seriously by modern historians of philosophy or political theory) include…the point-scoring, gotcha-critique of democracy as equivalent to tyranny because of the threatened spoliation of the rich and of the supposed lack of restraint and materialism of the populace of the poor…. Aristotle’s discussions of citizenship and the access to rule grudgingly or unconsciously acknowledge the gravitational pull of democratic ideas and consensus…, even if the seminar-like nature of the text includes much pushback against these ideas, or attempts to nuance them out of sight.

This sample will give the reader some idea of the flavor of the work, though the animus revealed here is exceptional. The thought expressed would not be out of place in a “seminar” of college sophomores. 

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Late in the book, Ma comes back to Aristotle and seems now to want to claim him as an inspiration. But this only reflects the book’s fundamental want of method. (It would have helped if Ma had begun the book with the last few chapters, which few readers are likely ever to reach.) Its overriding flaw is a reductionism that seems intent from the beginning on eliding basic differences between poleis, and then interpreting their later history as a process of homogenization that he casually characterizes as an “end of history,” though how far we are meant to take seriously the implied parallel with the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism is hardly clear. The problem begins with Athens and Sparta. The exceptional nature of both states is hard to dispute, but Ma cannot even bring himself to make a connection between extreme democracy in Athens and the political weight of a lower class that was critical for sustaining its naval power and hence its overseas empire. As for Sparta, Ma seems to treat it as a traditional oligarchical polity rather than one with unique features, not least its (highly egalitarian) warrior class; and he makes the elementary mistake of assuming that this highly militarized state had a consistently aggressive foreign policy. Ma could have benefitted from Hillsdale historian Paul Rahe’s recent monumental multi-volume history of Sparta in the 5th century. Remarkably, Rahe’s many fine books are missing from the 70-odd pages of the densely printed bibliography. 

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The problem does not end there. Ma never really offers a clear definition of the polis either in relation to its component parts (Aristotle’s “village”) or to other state forms, particularly tribes or ethnic federations. Nor does he attempt a typology of poleis as affected by factors such as geography, ethnicity, or military requirements. He makes a half-hearted claim to have discovered a superior periodization of polis history by identifying a previously unrecognized “Hundred Years’ War” spanning the midpoint of the 5th and 4th centuries, but fails to explain what makes this era truly different from the centuries of endemic violence surrounding it. 

If Ma has any claim to originality or utility, it rests on his extension of the history of the polis beyond the conquests of Alexander the Great (the end point of the Hansen catalogue) through the Hellenistic period and on to the end of the Roman Empire. The era of the Aetolian and Achaean leagues in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. is a rich one for study, but Ma’s treatment of it is entirely inadequate—one suspects because it does not suit his model. Ma’s interpretation of the later evolution of the polis is worth reading for its focus on the interaction of Roman overlordship and internal polis dynamics, though one has to wonder whether the poor documentation of much of this history can really support the broad generalizations he makes. Still, Ma deserves credit for the attention he gives to the Roman presence in the Near East, in the wake of the pioneering scholarship of the great Fergus Millar (acknowledged in the book’s dedication). 

A final word. Princeton University Press must bear some responsibility for this book, a mountain that delivers a mouse. It is much too long, repetitive, and confusing, and with a ritualized language (consider Ma’s constant use of the annoying word “negotiation,” for example) that verges on the meaningless. Did anyone edit it? One might also complain about the quality of the maps and the plates, most of them pointless in any case. It is difficult not to see the entire product as a commentary on the decline of a field that was once rightly considered the gold standard of German-style scholarly rigor.