What was a polis?
Polis is the Greek word for city, the root of our “politics”, and it named a whole community that ruled itself: a town, the fields and villages around it, its citizens, its laws, its gods. On the mainland the most powerful were Sparta, Corinth and Athens; around the Aegean and beyond there were many more. Even the colonies founded overseas were independent cities, tied to their mother city by religion and trade.
A polis had a physical shape too. In Athens the high rock of the Acropolis, about 170 by 350 metres, held the sanctuary of Athena, the city’s patron. Below it lay the Agora, the open square at the centre of public life, which became a public space early in the sixth century BCE, in the time of the lawgiver Solon.
Who paid for the art?
In Egypt and Mesopotamia the great monuments were royal commissions. In Greece the client was very often the city itself, which is why the most ambitious works stood in public. The clearest case is Athens after the Persian Wars: the wealth the city gathered after 479 BCE paid for Perikles’ building programme on the Acropolis, with the Parthenon at its centre.
Cities also competed with one another. In the seventh and sixth centuries the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the nearby islands raced to build huge stone temples. On Samos the architects Rhoikos and Theodoros raised a temple of Hera around 570-560 BCE that measured 52.5 by 105 metres, as long as a football pitch, the first in the new Ionic order. And a city could make an offering in another city’s sanctuary: the people of Argos dedicated the twin marble youths known as Kleobis and Biton to Apollo at Delphi, where every visitor would see them.
Private families commissioned art too, mostly for graves: the marble kore of Phrasikleia, made around 550-540 BCE, marked her grave at Myrrhinous, in the Attic countryside. But the works that defined a city’s image were public.
Rivals at the shared sanctuaries
If every city was independent, where did the Greeks meet? At sanctuaries that belonged to everyone. Delphi, under Mount Parnassus, and Olympia, in the north-western Peloponnese, were Panhellenic sanctuaries, that is, open to all Greeks (from pan, all, and Hellenes, the Greeks’ name for themselves). The Olympic Games were held at Olympia regularly from 776 BCE, and Delphi had its own Pythian Games.
These places were also showrooms. Statues of victorious athletes were set up in the sanctuaries as offerings to their gods. The Charioteer of Delphi, a bronze of 478-474 BCE, commemorates a victory in the Pythian Games. Walking through Delphi or Olympia was a little like walking through a world fair, with each city’s pavilion trying to outshine the next.
Every city had its own style
Independence showed in the workshops. Corinth was the great pottery centre of the seventh century, where painters invented figures in dark silhouette; by 550 BCE Athens had taken the lead, and its black-figure vases dominated the export market across the Mediterranean. The islands of the Cyclades sold their marble: the New York Kouros (about 590-580 BCE) is carved in marble from Naxos, the Peplos Kore of the Acropolis in marble from Paros.
Architecture had regional accents as well. The Doric order belonged to mainland Greece and the western colonies, the Ionic to the cities of Asia Minor and the Ionian islands, and you can still read a city’s world in its columns.
Theatres, walls and colonies
The polis also built for its own citizens. Tragedy grew out of an Athenian festival, the spring festival of Dionysos Eleuthereios, and Athenian Old Comedy openly ridiculed the city’s most prominent men. Around all this ran the walls: Athens had its circuit wall and, from about 458 BCE, the Long Walls to the port of Piraeus, about 7 kilometres, which turned city and harbour into one fortress. Walls, temples, theatres and stoas were the shared furniture of a city, the buildings of a Greek city that a citizen used every day.
Colonies carried the model overseas. Poseidonia, today Paestum, south of Naples, was founded by colonists from Sybaris and built three Doric temples between about 560 and 460 BCE. Syracuse, in Sicily, was founded by Corinthians in the eighth century BCE and gave itself a Greek theatre.
So how did the polis shape its art? By paying for it, by competing with its neighbours through it, and by keeping its own local habits.
Where to see it
In Athens, the Acropolis and the Ancient Agora show the two poles of a city, the sanctuary and the square. Delphi and Olympia show the shared sanctuaries; Samos, the Heraion; in Italy, Paestum and Syracuse show the colonies. Opening hours change with the season, so check the official site of each before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003); “Architecture in Ancient Greece” (2003); “Ancient Greek Colonization and Trade and their Influence on Greek Art”; “Theater in Ancient Greece”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Acropolis, Athens (404); Archaeological Site of Delphi (393); Archaeological Site of Olympia (517); Pythagoreion and Heraion of Samos (595); Cilento, Paestum and Velia (842); Syracuse and the Rocky Necropolis of Pantalica (1200).
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Ancient Agora of Athens; Kleobis and Biton; Charioteer of Delphi; Phrasikleia.
- Parchi Archeologici di Paestum e Velia, “Archaeological area of Paestum”.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.107.1 and 2.13.7 (Perseus Digital Library).
