This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Of all the spectacular remains of the ancient world, few have so fired the modern imagination as Palmyra. Perched on an oasis in the Syrian steppe, this was not an obvious spot for one of the great cities of the ancient world. Under the rule of the Roman Empire, however, its enterprising citizens played a major role in financing and organising commerce between east and west. They poured their profits into monumental buildings and the patronage of the arts; the results survive in quantity, even after the best efforts of ISIS to destroy them.

It is the extraordinary architectural remains for which Palmyra is justly famous, their impact accentuated by the dramatic backdrop of desert encircled by mountain. But Palmyra has also produced a truly remarkable number of “funerary busts” — stylised depictions of the deceased incorporated into their tombs. Here we can actually see, with startling immediacy, the ancient Palmyrenes, whether staring, neatly coiffured men or women tugging at their veils.

It is all too easy to interpret Palmyra as exotic and romantic, an eastern “pearl of the desert”, but that is only part of its story. Though it was indeed a great trading settlement of Syria, whose inhabitants spoke Aramaic, Palmyra was in institutional terms a Greek city, an autonomous statelet, ruling and taxing a large surrounding territory. It was governed by a council, which put motions to an assembly of citizens that passed decrees. There were magistrates to make these decisions effective and an archive to ensure they were recorded: some were inscribed in public places for all to see.

Wealthy citizens were expected to undertake difficult, dangerous and expensive tasks on behalf of the community. Those who did were honoured with statues: eventually more than 200 of these were to be found in the city’s agora, the marketplace and heart of civic life. The famous monumental buildings are in large part public constructions. The Palmyrenes had a sense of themselves as a collective: “the community of all the Tadmorians”, to use the city’s Aramaic name.

Palmyra is an exceptional example of one of the most successful inventions of Greek antiquity: the city-state or polis. Poleis existed from at least the eighth century BC to the very end of antiquity and were eventually to be found from the Middle East to the Western Mediterranean. To grasp their history is no easy thing, for it is so long, so geographically spread out and so diverse in form and content that it baffles explanation. 

The great historian A.H.M. Jones surveyed it in two monumental books written in the 1930s, for long the closest thing to a comprehensive overview. Reflecting just before his death on the ludicrously difficult task he had set himself, Jones said ruefully, “I was young.” He had been stung by the savage criticism of Louis Robert, a French scholar of the inscriptions that provide the bulk of our evidence for the polis, whose vengeful ghost still haunts the Greek epigrapher. Robert himself promised a history of the Greek city, but it never appeared.

Those interested in the ancient world should count themselves lucky that maturity has not dulled John Ma’s intellectual ambitions, nor fear of criticism deterred him from writing a comprehensive history of the polis. Squeezed into a single large volume, readers can now find a remarkable account of the Greek city, from its origins to its death, written by perhaps the leading expert on the subject. 

Two obvious problems bedevil any attempt to do what Ma has done. First, since they were so numerous, so widely distributed, since so much of ancient history took place against their backdrop, and since so much was written in or about them, how to avoid the story of the polis becoming a history of the ancient world? Second, given that a handful of famous cities have dominated ancient and the modern understanding of the polis, how to escape the trap of writing its history through the lens of Athens (or Sparta)?

To evade these difficulties, Ma takes an Aristotelian approach, focusing on power, politics and institutions and exploits his astonishing knowledge of the sources. This book occasionally feels like a card index that has been written out — I mean that as a compliment. 

Ma really has mastered the voluminous evidence, and it is a joy to watch him interpreting it: there is a lyricism to his descriptions of decrees and statues. If he is here and there given to rather murky theoretical language (I noted one paragraph with three instances of “structuration”), one can hardly hold it against him. Readers might, however, wonder why Princeton University Press did not copy edit the text with greater care — it is a shame that a large, well-produced, generously illustrated and reasonably priced book should have entered the world with so many minor errors.

The bulk of the book is a proper history, with a beginning, middle and end. We start with the “clustervilles” in the tenth century BC: groupings of little elite settlements with no clear centre. These turned into proto-urban conglomerations, with control of some territory around them, riven by tensions between elites and the masses. Such issues were resolved by a leap to statehood in the seventh century, with the widespread emergence of what became the polis proper: an autonomous, territorial political unit providing public goods.

There was enormous diversity in form at this stage. Some poleis had a small, egalitarian citizen elite lording it over serfs. Others were much broader and more open political communities, marked by social differentiation and fierce competition. 

The latter model proved more successful and spread throughout the Greek world in the sixth century BC. From 464 — 355 there was a “Hundred Years’ War”: various powerful poleis made bids for domination and there was widespread, often murderous political conflict. The rise of Macedon, the conquests of Alexander and the creation of the Hellenistic kingdoms brought this anarchic period to an end.

Paradoxically, the emergence of states far more powerful than any individual city opened a golden era for the polis, for the armies of the kings prevented large-scale violence between cities. Instead there was a “great convergence”, in which powerful cities lost their regional hegemonies, democracy became the most common form of government and poleis spread throughout the newly Greek-ruled east.

The growth of Roman power in the second century BC initially strengthened this before Roman violence made the first century a bleak era of plunder, brutality and subjection. Rome’s subsequent transformation into an imperial monarchy was broadly positive for the polis, which continued to act as an autonomous state integrated into a world-empire. 

Throughout the Roman period, democratic poleis remained strikingly good at disciplining and exploiting the wealthy, gently coercing them into paying for public goods. This model proved remarkably durable but, weakened by the transformation of the Empire in the late third and early fourth centuries AD, it gradually faded away, its last vestiges vanishing with the end of antiquity in the early seventh century.

Ma closes the book with four disarmingly honest chapters probing the foundations of his interpretation. He doesn’t hide his sympathy for the democratic polis of the “great convergence”, nor is he is blind to those excluded from or brutalised by it: foreigners, women, children, peasants and (above all) slaves. 

The unpleasant reality of this balance, the way that the good the polis did was so often rooted in the evil it caused, nags at him. There is also a real tension here between his desire to see the Greek city — autonomous, equal, democratic — as distinctive and important and his insistence that its importance was not distinctively Greek, let alone Western.

We live in an age that can be hostile to scholarly synthesis for a general audience. The sheer quantity of evidence and scholarship and the fragmentation of modern culture act as deterrents. Efforts to overcome this, to offer a real sense of the texture of a subject, are to be applauded, more so when they are as stimulating and ambitious as Ma’s. This is a book anyone seriously interested in the ancient world will want to read. ●