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polis
(redirected from poleis)

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Legal, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.02 sec.

polis

In ancient Greece, an independent city and its surrounding region under a unified government. A polis might originate from the natural divisions of mountains and sea and from local tribal and cult divisions. Usually the town was walled and contained a citadel on raised ground (acropolis) and a marketplace (agora). Government was centred in the town; usually there was an assembly of citizens, a council, and magistrates. Ideally, all citizens participated in the government and in the cults, as well as in defense and economy. Women, minors, metics, and slaves were not citizens. Hellenism spread many of the institutions into the Middle East. See also Athens; city-state; Sparta; Thebes.



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Turning to the Jesus movement in context of the Greco-Roman world, we find the term ekklesia used as a designation for the meeting of Jesus-followers, recalling the assemblies governing the Greek poleis.
Any valid computation of the number of city-states in ancient Greece must carefully exclude the vast mass of small towns - frequently called poleis in our sources - to be found in the large regions of mainland Greece in which the ethnos was the dominant political form: the best study of the ethnos, apparently unknown to Bryant, is still Adalberto Giovannini's superb monograph published in 1971 as number 33 in the Hypomnemata series.
 
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