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.
These goods were balanced—or overshadowed, according to critical accounts of polis historiography—by “bads.” The bads—violence, elite power, and exclusion—point to the inevitable conflict that arises in the social world. The “managing of tensions,” Ma contends, was a fundamental feature of the polis, a reality with which it was “dialectically bound”—“preceding, underlying, and flowing from the praxis of civic politics.”
But what held these ancient polis societies together? It’s an important question for Ma, since he argues frequently for the significance of the social context of the poleis, not merely as a backdrop of political activities but, refreshingly, as itself determinative. One uniting feature was idealism, beliefs about constitutions and the principles that underlie them. The most well-known case is Athenian democracy, for which Aristotle famously developed a philosophical foundation in his Politics.
Our own experience of social and cultural conflict might suggest idealism isn’t capable of holding together societies and mobilizing groups during their conflicts. Ma explores several cohesive agents: a notion of the common good, democratically determined limitations on elite power over the masses, a commitment to “an ennobling common project” that inspired Arendtian-style political work, and so on.
Notably absent from Ma’s theoretical framework is Émile Durkheim, whose analysis of collective effervescence explained how groups cohere via “social and moral density”—a concept expanded more recently as emotional energy. This variable integrates into major social theories (of Marx, Weber, and Goffman, for example), showing how we can identify the dynamics of a society, not merely its structure and its ideas. Emotional energy describes a “strong steady emotion, lasting over a period of time,” according to Randall Collins, which provides the basis for confidence, resolve, initiative, and the ability to dominate interactions. When interaction rituals succeed, group members grow attuned to each other, and the emotional “charge,” especially if sustained by shared symbols, can be carried forward through successive interactions in a chain.
In decrees and other political and civic inscriptions of the ancient world, historians have begun to recognize that various emotions such as fear, pride, and excitement were expressed to generate solidarity that held groups together in a place (Sparta, for example) and with a shared name (Spartans). And the location of these texts, chiseled into rock and mounted on a temple or civic building, became a symbol that recharged the emotional energy of the populace—or at least those who were enfranchised.
Consider again the decree about goats from Herakleia. The text, an inscription discovered in the late nineteenth century, calls down curses on anyone who would raise goats, and it asserts the dominance of the people to establish the safety of both citizens and inhabitants. Displayed at the “shrine of the Mother of the Gods,” the inscription reminded passersby of the power of the demos and, conflated with religious institutions and rituals, probably stoked fear of transgression. In other words, it charged and recharged the emotional energy of the citizens and, to the extent that elites were seeking private enrichment with the goats rather than serving the public good, the engraved decree would have sapped emotional energy from the elites, balancing power for the next democratic conflict by emotionally recharging civic virtues over selfish vices: In short, Ma’s “tragedy of the elites” chartering a caprine commons.
The theory of ritual interaction chains, then, deepens and elaborates the political dynamics of the poleis, showing the wider significance of personal ethics, even in oligarchies such as the Thessalian poleis or Sparta. A verse attributed to the mid-seventh-century elegiac poet Tyrtaeus, to take another example, rooted Sparta’s constitution in an oracle from Apollo and ordained kings and elders to speak honorably and act justly. As elite youth learned and recited this poem in school and, later, remembered it in their adulthood, they were formed and “charged,” as it were, as members of the ruling class.
The views we mostly have from ancient sources are those of literate elites who, even in the case of democratic poleis, could hold significant power. Ma’s discussions of elites may be rendered even more illuminating if they were to draw not only on scholarship about power and elite agenda-setting, but also on recent developments in elite theory. Scholars have posited at least three types of elites—political, economic, and cultural or status—who wield differing sanctions: force, goods and services, and expressions of approval and disapproval.
Ma doesn’t analytically disaggregate elites. Ancient status elites, those with cultural or religious power, are well known—think of Socrates or Sophocles or Tyrtaeus or Pindar’s Olympians, or indeed Aristotle, who largely frames Ma’s account. Within each elite type, antagonists create tensions: between old and new modes of production among economic elites; between warriors and officeholders and raiders, traitors, and invaders; and between priests and cultural figures and prophets and renouncers.
The bonds between political elites and respectable non-elites were enhanced, for example, by excluding noncitizens such as slaves and metics (foreigners who were members of another polis), meaning that exclusion was not merely a “dark side” of the polis, as Ma calls it. Rather the elite–respectable-non-elite bond strengthened by the exclusion of unrespectable non-elites constituted a fundamental basis of a polis’s stability. As classicist Robert Sobak has argued, “The diversity of economic class, age, occupation, and locale that characterized those who participated in the Athenian democracy was not a bug to work around, but a necessary and powerful feature of the system’s implementation and success.” The point could well apply to other democratic poleis. The production and dispersal of polis-related knowledge had, therefore, “a necessary social character to it…produced in the ‘free spaces’ of collective activities populated by Athens’ diverse population of mixed cultures,” comporting well with Ma’s characterization of polis culture as communitarian.
Diversifying elite types would also further specify implications of the competition Ma frequently points to. The speeches of Demosthenes provide evidence of competition and conflict, but the occasion of their composition signals a lack of violence. Moreover, the dramas, philosophies, and poems used in festivals, debates, and competitions point to alternative outlets for competitive urges that might otherwise have produced destabilizing violence. An analytically differentiated approach to elites may also make more legible the changing complexity of elites in other contexts, such as the Syriac-speaking city of Edessa.
Ma’s study captures not only the material record of the poleis but also posits the spiritual record of their animating pictures of the Good Life and the Good Society that permeated to Hellēnikon (“the Greek thing”). “The polis fostered investment and expenditure by secure, trustful citizens animated with a sense of stakeholding, belonging, and self-worth.” Ma’s big picture—of the coherence and persistence of the polis model—makes him sensitive to evidence, even from before 900 BC, of “a particular political anthropology, characterized by the absence of deeply embedded hierarchies, the weakness of elites, and the prevalence of multiple claims to power and recognition.”
Nonetheless, Ma rarely mentions paideia, or the institutions and contents of the transmission of that spiritual world of the polis. He would surely agree that the formation of virtuous citizens was central to a polis and its institutions, its people, and its elites. The formation of citizens, through virtue politics, also highlights a way that the polis persisted into and beyond Byzantium, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, into modernity.
Ma dedicates his book to the late Sir Fergus Millar, his Oxford doctoral supervisor and, later, one of my academic examiners. Millar lamented that “academic citizenship and academic democracy are completely dead. Each [scholar] goes about his or her business without a thought for common issues....” John Ma’s spectacular work, Polis, reminds us why accurate memories of the seminal Greek polis world could nurture our democratic institutions yet again.