The Polis

The polis was the independent Greek city-state: a town together with its surrounding countryside, governed by its own citizens. From the Archaic period (8th–6th c. BCE) onward it became the basic political unit of the Greek world, with Athens and Sparta as its most famous examples. Aristotle (4th c. BCE) gave the idea its classic theoretical statement in the Politics. He argued that the polis exists by nature, that it comes into being for the sake of mere survival but endures for the sake of the good life, and that a human being is by nature a 'political animal' (zōon politikon) — a creature meant to live in a polis. By fusing citizenship, law, religion, and communal identity into a single whole, the polis shaped later Western ideas of the citizen, the constitution, and the state.