ABSTRACT
In 1993 the Danish National Research Foundation set up at Copenhagen University a small research centre devoted to the study of the polis in ancient Greece. One of the main objectives of the Copenhagen Polis Centre is to build up an inventory of every single Archaic and Classical settlement which is explicitly called polis in contemporary sources. The main purpose of this investigation is to find out what the Greeks thought a polis was, and to compare that with what modern historians think a polis is.2 The concept polis found in the sources and in modern historiography ought, of course, to be the same. But that is far from always the case. Let me adduce just two examples. The orthodoxy is that the small Boiotian town Mykalessos was not a polis; it was rather a kome. This is indeed the term used by Strabo, whose classification is cited in, for example, PaulyWissowa s.v. Mykalessos, and again in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.3 What is passed over in silence in both these articles and in most other studies of the history of Boiotia is that Mykalessos is called a polis by Thucydides, not just once, but three times in a passage where he uses polis both in the urban and in the political sense of the word.4 Similarly, it is commonly believed that a klerouchy was not a polis.5 Nevertheless, the Athenian klerouchies are repeatedly classified as being poleis both in literary texts and in inscriptions.6
