Sample a Scandinavian diner in the Midwestern United States, and neither a goat’s milk nor its meat, a favorite of the Norse god Thor, will be found competing with lingonberries, lutefisk, and limpa. Such is true of Al Johnson’s, in Door County, Wisconsin, where goats appear not on the menu but, during the short growing months, on the roof. The first arrived in 1973, a birthday gift from Wink Larson to manicure Al’s be-sodded roof, the forebear of a now Instagram-famous herd and the April Fools’ Day inspiration for Al’s new robotic-goat servers. But according to the Door County Advocate, the first goat provoked from the citizens of that Lake Michigan city an indifferent “meh.”
The restaurateur and local school trustee Al Johnson enjoyed caprine privileges not granted to his ancient elite forebears on Herakleia. The citizens of that eighteen-kilometer island near Naxos in the Aegean Sea issued a decree forbidding goat farming, a decree that turned out to be enormously consequential for the development of the ancient polis.
So argues Columbia University classics professor John Ma, whose 736-page landmark study begins with this ancient goat decree promulgated during a period he calls the “great convergence,” when the non-democratic poleis were eclipsed after the superpower conflict in the Hundred Years’ War (464–355 BC) by the democratic poleis on the model of Athens. Ma frequently invokes Aristotle’s Politics, but, thankfully, his perspective is much broader than Aristotle’s, benefiting from both a modern historian’s evidence and methods and an ambitious historical sweep. The result is a biography of the polis, from its origins around 1200 BC, exploring its “long leap” to “stateness” by the seventh century BC, and snaking through the “long transformation” caused, at least in part, by Roman imperialism, when (surprisingly) poleis flourished, down to the fourth century AD.
Ma identifies six historical “vectors” that characterize the polis nearly from the beginning: institutionalism, idealism, and interests, which he calls goods, and violence, elite power, and exclusion, which he calls “bads.” While poleis were fundamentally symbolized by a group of citizens and a place name, they were self-governing and therefore existed as states with autonomy (autonomia) and thus required institutions, by which Ma mostly (and too narrowly) means political organizations. Poleis could be recognized by a common ideal, namely a public good achieved through “virtue politics,” practiced especially by elites, whose interests were balanced with the interests of the mass of citizens through euergetism, contributions for the beautification of public spaces, which redistributed resources and limited the ability of elites to convert financial capital into social capital.