ABSTRACT
Discussion so far has taken us literally and metaphorically beyond the polis world as traditionally conceived. Whatever one thinks a polis actually was in any given situation, it is patently unsustainable to use ancient (especially Aristotelian) analyses which treat it as the telos of Greek state formation to set standards against which ethne are defined by default. If, as Mogens Hansen has argued,1 the polis for Aristotle was the ‘atom of political society’, it must be capable of forming part of larger structures, and the existence of communities right across the ‘ethnos’ world which were explicitly termed poleis by their own members or by contemporary outsiders, in some cases (like Arkadia) as early as the Archaic period, raises the question of how they operated in such contexts. As emphasized in the introductory chapter, reconstruction of the early social and political history of Greek ethne thus demands consideration of the ways in which groups closed and opened, and the resulting definition of insiders and outsiders on different levels and in different contexts.
