From City-State to Empire

For much of the first millennium bce, independent city-states flourished in coastal areas across the Mediterranean basin. The Greeks were not the only ones whose poleis were situated “in a small portion around the sea like ants and frogs around a pond,” as Plato memorably put it (Phaedo 58).

Although in terms of sheer scale the Greek city-state culture of up to 1,000 different polities dwarfed its competitors, other clusters had developed elsewhere, most notably the Phoenician city-state cultures in what is now Lebanon and in North Africa and the Etruscan and Latin city-state cultures in the western Italian peninsula. These micro-states represented an intensely fragmented political ecology that thrived on the margins of—or at an even greater remove from—the large imperial formations that had long dominated the Ancient Near East (see Chapters 1-4 in this volume). And although these traditional empires periodically succeeded in subduing at least some of these polities (in Lebanon and the western rim of the Aegean), it was a handful of Mediterranean city-states that eventually managed to absorb their peers into larger systems of domination and rule: Athens, Carthage, Syracuse, and Rome. City-states without empire gave way to empire built by city-states. This process was rather unusual in world-historical terms: whereas city-states frequently formed leagues and alliance systems and at times subjugated micro-states within their own cluster, individual city-states were rarely capable of transforming themselves into the centers of large tributary empires.¹

There were good reasons for this. That imperial state formation by city-states encountered considerable obstacles was not merely a function of their generally modest size but of their structural properties and the environment in which they had usually developed. While city-states differed in many ways across time and space, they had enough in common to justify identifying them as a recognizably distinct type of state.² City-states have been defined as micro-states, “small,

¹ The Triple Alliance that created the Aztec Empire is the main exception (see Chapter 24 in this volume).

Little is known about the origins of Akkad's rise to power, and Assyria had already turned into a territorial state well beyond the city-state of Assur before it established a larger empire.

² For a brief summary, see Scheidel 2013, 30-32.

Walter Scheidel, Ancient Mediterranean City-State Empires In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0005. territorially based, politically independent state systems, characterized by a capital city or town, with an economically and socially integrated adjacent hinterland,”^{^[368]} although self-government may well be a more suitable definitional threshold than actual independence. Comparative consideration of 35 city-state cultures from around the world allowed Mogens Herman Hansen to develop an ideal-typical description of the city-state:

a highly institutionalised and highly centralised micro-state consisting of one town (often walled) with its immediate hinterland and settled with a stratified population, of whom some are citizens, some foreigners, and, sometimes, slaves. Its territory is mostly so small that the urban centre can be reached in a day's walk or less, and the politically privileged part of its population is so small that it does in fact constitute a face-to-face society. The population is ethnically affiliated with the population of neighbouring city-states, but political identity is focused on the city-state itself and based on differentiation from other city-states. A significantly large fraction of the population is settled in the town [... ]. The urban economy implies specialisation of function and division of labour to such an extent that the population has to satisfy a significant part of their daily needs by purchase in the city's market. The city-state is a self-governing but not necessarily an independent political unit.^[369]

Most importantly, city-states did not normally evolve in isolation but as part of larger clusters of small polities that tended to share the same culture, including language and religion, and very closely interacted through war, diplomacy, and alliance-building.^[370] This environment favored balancing mechanisms that impeded outright conquest and empire- building.

Hansen's global survey of city- state cultures consequently finds that while expansion often led to smaller city-states being absorbed into the territory of larger ones, hegemonic leagues and federations were more common means of further scaling up. Moreover, even when one city-state managed to extend its rule over an entire cluster, “the city-state usually persist[ed],” turning the dominant polity into a large capital that controlled “an empire built up of dependent city-states.”^[371]

Embeddedness in larger clusters imposed constraints on and provided opportunities for expansion of individual city-states that shaped outcomes in very specific ways. It is therefore not by coincidence that similar processes of scaling up can be observed in each of the major city-state empires of the ancient Mediterranean. This chapter focuses on three key features.

First of all, the city-state cultures under review were characterized by high levels of popular participation. Many of their members were or became republics; and even under more autocratic regimes, participatory institutions such as councils and assemblies were common, and citizenship was often a well-defined concept associated with specific rights and obligations. As a result, these city-states formed communities whose potential for social cohesiveness was high by pre-modern standards. In practice, activation of this potential and imperial state-building tended to go hand in hand. Ancient city-states primarily relied on mass mobilization of their own population to pursue expansionist goals, even if mercenary forces gradually gained importance in the course of this process. Mass mobilization prompted bargaining processes between elites and the commoner (citizen) population of the core city-state. As a result, popular political participation and military capabilities often expanded in lockstep.

Second, city-states that managed to establish tributary empires did so by initially creating and then dominating an alliance of city-states within their own cluster which they sought to transform into a larger core region of an imperial structure reaching well beyond this cluster.

Core city-states maintained political institutions that were separate from those of the subject polities of their tributary peripheries. “Unit change,” such as from a city-state to the capital of a more integrated territorial state (for instance, the creation of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany by the citystate of Florence), either did not occur at all or took a very long time to unfold: for centuries, city-state cores and peripheral structures coexisted side by side.

Third, in this environment, extractive arrangements were developed in the first instance for the purpose of war-making (broadly defined not just as military activities but including preparation for war), and accumulated financial resources were primarily committed to the same goal and secondarily to bargaining processes that ultimately facilitated further war-making. Unlike the more interstitial and commercially developed city-states of medieval or early modern European history which employed “capital-intensive” strategies of state-making, ancient Mediterranean city-states relied more on domestic mass mobilization and coercive extraction from subordinates to pursue their foreign policy objectives.^[372] The following survey of the three main city-state empires of the ancient Mediterranean—Athens, Carthage, and Rome—is organized around these three premises.^[373]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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