IV.

Life in the Polis

Poleis were not “city states”, divided from the surrounding countryside. They included both the countryside and urban centres within the boundaries. Nor were they temple cities or sacred areas, although, within each polis, space, time, and money were set aside for public worship. Greek religion always included many gods whom it honoured with sacrificed animals, precious gifts, and offerings of grain and wine. There was no one Church, no orthodoxy of belief. Different gods helped with different areas of life—Hera with married life, Poseidon with seafaring—but their powers extended widely. Each polis had its own religious calendar of festivals for gods, most of whom were honoured at public altars outside temples, the houses for their images. Citizens served as priests and priestesses on fixed days, but they were not a trained or specialized group of experts. The gods helped with mortals, crops, families, and worldly successes, and the cults of the polis helped life to go on better. Life after death was not usually their concern, and there was no general belief in an afterlife. Opinions on the matter varied and, although a few cults did emerge to assure a safer fare after death, many people accepted that they died for ever or, at most, that their souls lived a shadowy existence in an underworld without punishments.

Poleis were communities of citizens, not of members of a faith. The wives and daughters of citizens did have an important public role as priestesses of public cults and festivals. However, they played no role in politics or war. In Athens, they could not own land and, even in poleis where they could inherit a small share of a family’s estates, they were under the control of a kyrios, or guardian. War, land, and politics were the business of men.

As the life of a polis-community developed, so did political constitutions which recognized the rights of male citizens. Those males had also owned slaves, home-based or taken in war. Slaves helped with the work on farms and did most of the work in mines. By definition, they were bought and sold like objects, but in the poleis which developed into democracies, they were usually foreigners, bought from non-Greek homes or captured by war or piracy.