Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity
by John Ma

The Greek polis, or city-state, was a resilient and adaptable political institution founded on the principles of citizenship, freedom, and equality. Emerging around 650 BCE and enduring to 350 CE, it offered a means for collaboration among fellow city-states and social bargaining between a community and its elites—but at what cost? Polis proposes a panoramic account of the ancient Greek city-state, its diverse forms, and enduring characteristics over the span of a millennium.

In this landmark book, John Ma provides a new history of the polis, charting its spread and development into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa and from the Near East to Italy. He explores its remarkable achievements as a political form offering community, autonomy, prosperity, public goods, and spaces of social justice for its members. He also reminds us that behind the successes of civic ideology and institutions lie entanglements with domination, empire, and enslavement. Ma’s sweeping and multifaceted narrative draws widely on a rich store of historical evidence while weighing in on lively scholarly debates and offering new readings of Aristotle as the great theoretician of the polis.

About the Author

John Ma is a Professor of Classics at Columbia University. He is the author of Statues and Cities: Honorific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World, Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor, and numerous articles on ancient history. His main interests lie in the history of the ancient Greek world and its broader context (including the ancient near-east). Within Greek history, he is particularly interested in the handling of epigraphical and archaeological evidence, historical geography, and the complexities of the Hellenistic world. His research tries to combine philological attentiveness (especially in the case of Greek inscriptions), interpretive awareness (for literary but also documentary evidence), groundedness in materiality and concrete space, and a feeling for legal, social, and economic realities.

About the Speakers

Richard Billows is a Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in Ancient Greek and Roman History, with particular interests in the so-called Hellenistic Era (ca. 330 to 30 BCE) and the Roman Republic in its later phase (ca. 220-27 BCE); though recently his interests have also come to include the origins of Christianity in the first two centuries CE. Professor Billows regularly teaches the Columbia College core curriculum class “An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West” and an introductory lecture course on “The Ancient Greeks,” in addition to a variety of more specialized courses on aspects of Greek and (sometimes) Roman history. Professor Billows was for many years the Chair of the Graduate Interdepartmental Program in Classical Studies.

Ellen Morris is an Associate Professor at Barnard Classics and Ancient Studies Chair, Classical Studies Graduate Program. She has published three books and numerous articles on issues pertinent to ancient Egyptian imperialism. Her first book is entitled The Architecture of Imperialism: Military Bases and the Evolution of Foreign Policy in Egypt’s New Kingdom (Brill, 2005). Her second, Ancient Egyptian Imperialism (Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2018), engages the work of scholars of early empires in examining various instances of Egyptian imperialism from an explicitly cross-cultural perspective. Her most recent book, Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2023), addresses the subject of trauma and social memory.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is an Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in Classics with a WWS certificate (2006; Latin Salutatory), held the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship to read for the M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History at Oxford (2008); received a Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford (2014), generously supported by the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, and after a two-year postdoctoral stint at Columbia’s Society of Fellows, returned to Princeton where in addition to Classics, he is affiliated with the Program in Latino Studies.

Seth Schwartz, the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization at Columbia University, is a political, social and cultural historian of the Jews who specializes in the period between Alexander the Great and the rise of Islam, and has become especially interested in the anthropological and social theoretical aspects of his field. Before returning to Columbia in 2009, he taught for fourteen years at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is co-author, with Roger Bagnall, Alan Cameron and Klaas Worp of Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta, 1987), and author of Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden, 1990) and Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, 2001), Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton, 2009), and The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge, 2014).

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