Early Greek kingdoms were ruled by chieftains or kings, who led groups of families to new settlements and organised them militarily to defend themselves from outsiders. According to Aristotle (384-322 BC) a king ruled with consent of the people and with limited powers acted as general, judge and the head of religious observances. In his role as judge, the king settled arguments between oikoi (‘households’ or ‘families’).
These kingdoms were not large and usually consisted of scattered oikoi relying on farming to survive. But as the disorder of the Dark Age ended, the population began to grow and the first towns grew up around the king’s residence. The kings relied on the advice of the heads of the wealthiest oikoi to run the government. These advisors formed an elite class, the basilees, with the king being called a basileus. The basilees formed the nobility and its leaders called themselves aristoi (‘the best’). These aristocrats looked down on what they called hoi polloi (‘the many’), a term still used today to describe large masses of poor or powerless people.
The ‘best’ people belonged to families that arrived early enough in the area to possess good land on the plain that was the focus for the city’s existence. As the population increased, the poorer families took up land farther away from the city. When such people formed outlying villages they became known as perioikoi (‘dwellers around’).
The beginning of the Archaic period saw the emergence of the polis (‘city’), consisting of a principal city and its surrounding countryside which together formed an autonomous political unit, the ‘city-state’. Homer’s Greece was divided into regions, each of which was called a deme, a term used to describe both the territory and the people living in it. The process by which demes became unified into a single state is called synoecism (‘joining together’). Synoecism happened in various ways: a group of villages could physically amalgamate to form a township, as happened at Sparta and Corinth; or the villages could agree to accept one of their number as their centre, which is what happened in Attica where the rise of Athens simply subordinated the villages.
Parts of the Peloponnese and Northern Greece were dotted with small villages that lacked a central town that could serve as a capital. The Greeks called these regions the ethne (the plural of ethnos, which means ‘tribe’ or ‘nation’). In general, as time went on, it was only the more backward communities that persisted with this type of structure.
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