The ancient Greece is the home to thousands of relatively independent city states, called polis (πόλις) and its plural form poleis (πόλεις). But why wasn’t there a united empire but rather thousands of scattered states all over of the ancient Greece until the time of Phillip the Second?
The role of geography
Greek city states likely developed because of the geography of the region. Greek landscape features rocky, moutainous and numerous islands. These natural features act as physical barriers and caused population to be sparsed and isolated from others, thus encouraged the developement of relative small independent city states.
Diversity and uniqueness
Another reason for the absence of a centralized goverment was the diversity in kind of pollitical systems and ideology. Autocracy, Democracy, Monarchy, Oligarchy, Tyranny and the list goes on, more than 500 types of governments. Thousands of them are tiny, but it is still enough to cause big troubles to who wants to try to unite them.
It’s also necessary to state that the Greek aristocracy themselves strove to maintain their states’ independence. Athens elites didn’t want their state to be part of others. Neither did the Thebes, Corinth, Spartan,…