snitsnat wrote:
>
> What was the typical size of the
> Greek polis?
No one really knows. The Greeks of the 6th & 5th centuries, and even of the 4th century, didn't really write much down, so our sources for statistical knowledge are extremely sparse. Athens was the largest, and estimates as I recall run from less than 50 to a bit over 100 thousand -- counting women, slaves, children, and resident aliens (none of whom had citizenship privileges). Historians don't even agree on how the slaves were used. The sources that have impressed me most argue that they were rarely used for productive purposes, since all the farmland was split up into patches (even that owned by the rich), which would make the employment of an over seer counter-productive. The major use of slave, in this theory, was as servants. In thinking about servants, remember that money couldn't buy you much that was immediately useful; there were no sewing machines, no bread shops, no clothing manufacturars, no washing machines, no refrigerators. The daily meal came from grain ground that day often, or at least ground within the household. And the Democratic Revolution had freed the peasants from ALL obligarions to provide services to the aristocracy. So without a large number of slaves as servants it would have been of no use to be rich.
The Pesant villages pretty much ruled themselves, owing no one anything. It was indeed a peasant utopia, but put the emphasis on _peasant_, not on utopia. Nevertheless, the Athenian democracy was one of the longest lasting democracies in human history, and when it went down before the might of Alexander, it went down fighting and knowing what it was fighting for. In measuring, I'm assuming that the u.s. after 1865 should be called the Second Republic. Our descendants will have to decide if (a) we are now living in the Third Republic and (b) if so, when the shift occurred. But one could argue that the Second Republic lasted only as long as Reconstruction.
Carrol