Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens

A genuinely new political form. For millennia, the standard model across the Near East was the hierarchical kingdom, with land owned by king or temple. During the Archaic period (750 to 480 BCE), Greek communities evolved something different: property held by private individuals, and political offices shared among a group of roughly equal citizens who ruled and were ruled in turn.

Early written laws reveal the assumption of isonomia (fair shares, equality under the law) baked in from the start. Many stipulate that an office can be held only once per decade, preventing any one man from monopolizing power. This sharing of authority, rather than concentrating it in one ruler, was the foundational seed. The central question dividing Greek states for centuries became whether power should be shared among all citizens or only a wealthy few.

Not representation, but participation. Modern democracies elect people to govern for us. In Athens after Cleisthenes' reforms of 508 BCE, the people literally were the government. Any citizen over twenty could speak and vote in the Assembly; juries numbered in the hundreds or thousands; up to a quarter of male citizens over thirty served on the Council in a given period.

Three features made it radical:
1. Sortition (selection by lottery) for most offices, assuming any citizen could do the job.
2. Term limits (most posts once per lifetime) to spread experience and block power bases.
3. Pay for public service, so poverty did not bar participation.

Ostracism let the Assembly exile any man deemed too dangerous for ten years, no crime required, if six thousand votes were cast.

A society engineered for war on a knife's edge. After conquering neighboring Messenia around 610 BCE, Spartans found themselves vastly outnumbered by resentful serfs called helots, who worked their farms and handed over half the produce so Spartiate men could train full-time as soldiers.

This dependency shaped everything. Spartan citizens underwent the agoge, a brutal state education from age seven emphasizing endurance, theft, and violence. They ate in communal messes, and losing the ability to contribute meant losing citizenship. To keep helots terrified, Sparta formally declared war on them each year (so killing one was not murder) and sent young men to hunt them by night. The system produced Europe's finest soldiers and a paranoid, xenophobic state that reinvented its own history, attributing everything to a possibly mythical lawgiver, Lycurgus.

No scripture, no church, no creed. Greek religion had no sacred text, no commandments, no priesthood with a vocation, and no institution to enforce orthodoxy. It was overwhelmingly a matter of performing the right rituals at the right times, an obligation you assumed as a member of a community.

The gods were approached through reciprocity, not love: you sacrificed and prayed expecting a return, reminding the deity of your good record. This flexibility made the system tolerant of new gods and easy to merge with foreign pantheons. It also made religion this-worldly, concerned with good harvests and safety now rather than salvation later, which is precisely why the state ran it. Lacking a church, the polis organized worship, decided orthodoxy, and funded festivals. Athens alone sacrificed over 6,000 oxen a year.

A ritualized contest, not total war. For much of the Classical period, hoplite battle between Greek city-states followed unwritten conventions. Both sides deployed openly, fought a brief clash (often minutes to a couple of hours), and the loser signaled defeat by requesting a truce to collect the dead. The winner erected a trophy and everyone usually went home. Victory was rarely followed up with conquest or regime change.

Casualty rates stayed relatively modest: roughly 5% for winners, 15 to 20% for losers, most of the latter dying in flight. Waterfield argues this restraint reflected a recognition that this was Greeks fighting Greeks. Atrocities (massacres, enslavement) were far more common in naval battles, sieges, and wars against non-Greeks. The Peloponnesian War shattered these norms, introducing year-round campaigns, garrisons, and mercenaries.

Dispersal, paradoxically, created identity. In the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, roughly 40,000 Greeks emigrated, founding trading posts and cities from Spain to the Black Sea, driven by land hunger and profit. A new overseas settlement was founded roughly every two years in the late eighth century.

The key insight: these colonies mixed settlers from many different Greek cities, who suddenly noticed what they had in common versus the non-Greeks (barbaroi, literally other-language-speakers) surrounding them. Rhodian settlers in Sicily discovered they were all Rhodians; back home the three Rhodian towns then began identifying as one. At the emporium of Naucratis in Egypt, nine Greek communities jointly worshipped at a shrine to the gods of the Greeks. Ethnicity, Waterfield stresses, is a construct, aggregated from perceived shared traits and then glued together with invented myths of common descent.

Two revolutions with a shared root. Coinage appeared around 600 BCE in Lydia and neighboring Greek cities, spreading fast because it simplified how states collected and disbursed revenue while advertising civic prestige. Within a century, over a hundred states minted their own.

Almost simultaneously, in sixth-century Miletus, thinkers like Thales and Anaximander launched what later scholars called the Greek miracle: explaining the world through single natural substances rather than gods (reductionism), and backing claims with argument and evidence rather than divine authority. Waterfield links these to the city-state itself. In assemblies and councils, citizens weighed competing proposals and demanded speakers justify themselves. Rational argument became the civic norm; the philosophers simply extended it to the cosmos. He even speculates coinage seeded the idea of infinite substitutability, one thing becoming many.

A new world demanded new selves. When Alexander conquered the Persian Empire (334 to 323 BCE), he flung Greeks across Egypt and Asia, ruling perhaps 40 million people. Hundreds of thousands emigrated, uprooted from ancestral homes, kinship groups, and the collective identity of the old city-state.

The Hellenistic period (323 to 30 BCE) that followed saw a striking cultural shift toward the individual. Classical art had portrayed idealized types (the noble warrior, the modest woman); Hellenistic art embraced realism and ordinary people: hunchbacks, exhausted boxers, children, slaves. Comedy dropped politics for domestic soap opera. New philosophies (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Skepticism) promised personal tranquility and self-improvement rather than civic virtue. Religion turned toward personal salvation cults like Isis and Serapis. Even women gained more freedom and, occasionally, real power.

Terror plus the freedom slogan. Rome took Greece not through overwhelming occupation but through repeated, calculated intervention between 229 and 146 BCE. Its method was to keep Greeks divided and cheaply controlled. Roman armies would win, impose terms, then withdraw entirely, relying on their fearsome reputation and the implied threat of return.

The cynical masterstroke was the freedom slogan. At the Isthmian Games of 196 BCE, the general Flamininus dramatically declared the Greeks free from Macedon, to ecstatic celebration. But real freedom, as the Aetolians pointed out, would mean freedom from Rome too. In practice, Greeks now needed the Roman Senate's approval for anything significant. When the Achaean Confederacy finally defied Rome, Corinth was destroyed in 146 BCE, its people killed or enslaved, ending Greek independence for nearly 2,000 years.

The one missing ingredient. Waterfield closes by asking why Greeks, so obviously a people, took until 1832 CE to become a nation-state. They shared language, kinship, gods, dress, and even a sense of common history (the Trojan War, the Persian Wars). Over time, especially after Alexander, they increasingly acted on this shared Greekness, using kinship diplomacy where cities appealed to distant cities for help based on mythical shared ancestors.

But one thing was always absent: a common territory. Most definitions of ethnicity require a shared or claimed homeland, and the Greeks never had one. They were scattered around a sea they could not possess. Fourth-century orators fantasized about Greece as a common fatherland, but it was rhetoric. Political unification stayed partial and cultural, held only in the imagination, until the 1832 War of Independence finally gave Greece territory, government, and nationhood.