citizenship, Greek
citizenship, Greek Greek citizenship stemmed from the fusion of two distinct but related elements,
(a) the notion of the individual state as a ‘thing’ with boundaries, an ongoing existence, and a power of decision, and
(b) the notion of its inhabitants participating in its life as joint proprietors
. The first element was a product of the various processes of state formation which eroded personal chieftainship by centralizing power and exercising it through a growing number of offices or magistracies with limited length of tenure: at first denoted by an extended use of the word
polis, it later engendered the more abstract term
politeia, ‘polity’, ‘constitution’, or ‘commonwealth’. The second element developed from the informal but ineradicable roles which
Homer already portrays as being played in communal life by the
dēmos (the territory or settlement and its...
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