Polis

here has a prior education? How many of you know how to read? A good majority of us don’t, and this is where, if we don’t take action, we will end up making the wrong decisions based off our uneducated knowledge that may harm or even destroy our Polis! Assembly members, men of Athens, stand with me when I say that we need to have councilmen that are educated help make decisions on our behalf. I say we propose laws and write them, and once we are done with that we send those laws out to the…

“The influence of the city-based cultures and the steady spread and increase of urban populations around the world have been the central facts of human history” (13). Since the beginning of time, cities have been influencing people and the people have been influencing the city in which they live in. As said in the reading, urban life is defined by the community, the government and the economy. The history of cities is complex and it changed in many ways throughout time, starting with the first…

In this article Paul Cartledge is trying to answer the question “what have the Spartans done for us”. One of the reasons he gives is Sparta’s “spirit of self sacrifice”. He connects the Spartans “ideologically motivated suicide” to that of the suicide hijackers who caused 9/11 for the sake of their religion. The Spartans were very patriotic and obedient to their laws. In 480 during the battle of Thermopylae they continued to stand against Persians even though their army was significantly smaller…

democracy in Athens is possible if greed is eliminated, equality achieved, and empathy developed because these three elements constitute the backbone of a virtuous polis. The unrepressed voice advances the common good. Ignorance decreases when participation increases. A problem for Aristophanes is the oppression of the citizens in the polis. People are penalized for speaking…

Athens, Sparta, and Thebes all failed to create a lasting “Greek Empire.” While each polis had its own strengths and weaknesses, the poleis all failed for similar reasons. The poleis failed mainly due to almost constant power struggles, arrogance, and involvement in conflicts they should not have been involved in. Athens, Sparta, and Thebes all failed in spite of various strengths and due to various weaknesses. Athens’ strengths included its large size, large trireme navy, wealth,…

two distinctions : zoe versus bios and oikos versus polis. Zoe refers to the form of life common to all living things, whereas bios refers to a form of life specific to an individual or groups. Agamben's second distinction runs in parallel: oikos is concerned with managing a household and household economics, whereas the polis is concerned with developing the good life. Agamben tells us that, starting with Aristotle and the Greeks, the Western polis was founded by relegating zoe to the oikos.…

was through the polis that this was sustained (Rahe p. 275). The Athenians believed civic duty to be of the utmost importance, it was to have the ability to affect others or at least seem to that the Athenians believed was the purpose of life and was lesueur itself (Rhea, p. 272). Their society was built upon the premises trades and jobs are menial tasks, tasks that they could do in their sleep, and the rigor was needed in life and could be obtained through challenges in the polis. Historians…

Dark Ages (1100-776 BCE) in Greece, the polis was a city that created a complex and sophisticated civilization based on the political institution and philosophical resolution (Mathisen 2012, 167). Two of the most powerful city states in Greece during the time of the Classical Age (500-387 BCE) were Spartans and Athenians, conflicting with one another during their highest point in their own civilizations. Neither Sparta nor Athens were considered the ideal polis because both city states had their…

driven by “an entrepreneurial spirit, not an exploitative one” (110). Groups of these people would colonize new settlements for commercial ties and connections and, unsurprisingly, these new settlements often shared many characteristics of the home polis (111). Countless amounts of settlements were created…

Introduction Greece’s culture was made up of many different societies that made it so diverse. From the artistic and cultural hub of Athens, to the militaristic and brutal polis of Sparta. There were many more poleis in between both which, even though belittled by Sparta and Athens, triumphed in creating their own governmental structures. There were five main types of governmental structures in Ancient Greece; Monarchy, Aristocracy, Tyranny, Oligarchy, and Democracy. In the following, we will go…