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Oct. 3 - Oct. 10, 2004 |
It All Began in Greece
The birth of the polis and democracy paved way to modern civilization
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2004-08-22
The birthplace of Western civilization is Greece. Everybody agrees on this. That's where philosophy was born; for the Greeks this word did not mean arguing on abstract issues, but explaining what happened, i.e., thinking. This brought rational reflection, systematic research, doubt, irony, a taste for communicating, the discovery of the civic community and therefore of the equality of people. Democracy, which took its baby steps in Greece, could not be born without a preexisting specific mindset.
One thousand years b.C.E., the concept of democracy had precise connotations in Greece and a well-developed state form: the polis, the city-state. The concept of democracy grew and strengthened in the polis. The Greeks had always reacted violently to any attempt to bring them within a larger state: they liked to keep their borders within eyesight, look their rulers in the face and snoop into their affairs, as those were actually everybody's affairs. These were the premises that gave rise to the various polis that formed in Greece, almost constantly at war with one another, except when they were at war with some common foe.
This happened mostly with the Persians, who tried repeatedly, over most of the 5th century b.C.E., to conquer Greece in order to gain a bridgehead in the Mediterranean. Every time, sworn enemies Athens and Sparta joined forces to lead the terrible Greek reaction. In the plain of Marathon, 11,000 Greeks fought back 100,000 Persians; at the Thermopilae pass, 300 Spartans held out for days against an army 800 times as large: they were exterminated, but gave their allies time to get organized. The Greeks settled the score first at Salamis, where they sunk the much stronger enemy fleet, and then at Plataea, where they finally rid the Persian kings of their habit of coveting Greece.
This is the first part of the patrimony that Europe inherited from Greece: the polis, meaning freedom but also independence, self-rule, participation. In summary, democracy. In Italy, the polis would find an ideal continuation in the Medieval saga of the Free Municipalities. Much like in Greece the polis rebuffed the Persian kings, in Lombardy the same happened to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. The municipal freedom would later originate the Signorias of Italian Renaissance and the regional states in the rest of Europe. Nowadays, the Ländern that make up Germany trace back their origins to those regional states.
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