A Collège de France - CNED coproduction
Extract
"My point of reference will be the Greek city, the concept of polis, which has recently been the subject of numerous studies, notably as part of the vast international survey carried out over the last ten years on this theme by The Copenhagen Polis Centre, directed by our dynamic Danish colleague Mogens Hansen, which has resulted in the census of over a thousand cities in the Archaic and Classical periods alone! How is our knowledge of the poleis of Asia Minor enriched by this unhoped-for mass of new inscriptions of all kinds, documents that were largely left out of the Copenhagen project for the simple reason - too simple to be really good - that they belong for the most part to the Hellenistic and Roman periods?
First and foremost, it's a question of numbers: the inventory of cities continues to grow. Of course, the new additions to the list of known poleis are not, as a general rule, very large cities that have hitherto curiously escaped the attention of archaeologists and historians. Nevertheless, several of them, in various slightly eccentric regions, may have been endowed with a not inconsiderable local importance: for example, in the depths of Phrygia, the town of Toriaion or Tyriaion, a Macedonian military establishment whose inhabitants were authorized around 180 BC. - as we recently learned from a highly original set of letters from King Eumenes II of Pergamon - to form a civic body or politeuma with the local indigenous population under certain conditions; the same applies, apparently, to the Angeireis of Pisidia or Pamphylia, a people who, according to a fine Hellenistic decree, formed a perfectly organized and resourceful city, even though no literary text makes the slightest mention of them, apart from a corrupted passage in Cicero's De lege agraria. The regular appearance of new cities, whatever their size, therefore confirms the extreme fragmentation of the political map of the Greek world, and of Asia Minor in particular..."
