Ancient Greece was 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 ancient Greece until the time of Phillip the Second?
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The Role of Geography
Greek city-states likely developed because of the region’s geography. The Greek landscape features rocky, mountainous terrain and numerous islands. These natural features acted as physical barriers and caused populations to be sparse and isolated from one another, thus encouraging the development of relatively small, independent city-states.
Diversity and Uniqueness
Another reason for the absence of a centralized government was the diversity in political systems and ideology. Autocracy, Democracy, Monarchy, Oligarchy, Tyranny, and the list goes on, with more than 500 types of governments. Thousands of them were tiny, but it was still enough to cause big troubles for anyone who wanted to try to unite them.
It is also necessary to state that the Greek aristocracy themselves strove to maintain their states’ independence. Athens’ elites did not want their state to be part of others. Neither did the Thebes, Corinth, Spartans, and so on.