Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2013
Abstract
The chapter takes off from a discussion of Christian Meier's thesis about the invention of politics in ancient Greece; it then goes on to argue that although politics was not invented for the first time in the Greek polis, the political sphere was transformed in complex and far-reaching ways. This process was embedded in civilizational patterns, including religious ones, and that background also helps to understand the diversity of developmental lines, exemplified by city-states such as Athens and Sparta, but also some less familiar ones.