ABSTRACT
For well over a hundred years, people studied the Greek city as an entity without making more than negligible use of archaeological evidence. As late as 1969, in the translated second edition of Victor Ehrenberg’s Der griechische Staat,1 the reader has to search very hard indeed to find even a veiled recourse to archaeology. The historians of the polis saw themselves as dealing essentially with an abstraction; they avoided tawdry physical detail, much as they tended to eschew the whole diachronic approach; and both exclusions rendered archaeology superfluous. The archaeologists showed little sign of minding this: they carried on studying their temples, statues and pots, innocent not of all historical considerationsfrom the 1930s to the 1950s was, after all, the golden age of the ‘political’ interpretation of pottery-distributions-but certainly innocent of any concern with historical entities like the city-state.
