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surrounding hinterland. Competition between each city, or polis, was intense, expressed not only in conventional warfare, but in vying over foreign markets, skilled labor, the arts, and even in athletic contests. As Plato would later observe: “Every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting.” 6
    Driven by this competitive spirit, the Greeks created a highly individualistic intellectual culture encompassing art, sculpture, and drama that to this day defines much of the Western urban ideal. They incubated an aggressively urban consciousness that would resonate with city dwellers for centuries to come. Socrates expressed this new sensibility when he remarked: “The country places and the trees don’t teach me anything, and the people in the city do.” 7
    Unlike philosophers elsewhere, focused on divinity and the natural world, Greek thinkers pondered the role of citizens in guaranteeing the health of the koinonia, or community. 8 Citizens, Aristotle noted, were like hands on the deck of a ship. Their duty was to assure “the preservation of the ship in its voyage. . . .” 9 In Athens, this led to an even more radical notion—that, as the Athenian legislator Solon would remark, citizens should, by right, be “the masters of the state.” 10
    This ideal was made practicable by the relatively small size of Greek cities. In the fifth century B.C., no Greek city, with the exception of Athens, was home to more than 150,000 inhabitants. And only a fraction of the residents in any city were citizens. Even Athens, the largest, never had more than 45,000 citizens 11 out of a total population of 275,000. 12
    Unlike the Phoenicians, the Greeks traditionally had little respect for commerce. Hermes, the god of thieves, performed simultaneously as the god of merchants. Craftsmen, whose works we still admire today, fared little better. Their minds, Plato complained, were “as cramped and crushed by their mechanical lives as their bodies are crushed by the manual crafts.” 13 Nor was the status of women particularly elevated. Greek romantic idealism worshipped (if anything) not love between men and women, but friendship as well as homosexual relationships between men. 14
    Everyday life in cities such as Athens must have been, even for most citizens, mean, dirty, and uncomfortable. In the shadow of great buildings like the Parthenon, houses were small, alleys narrow and filled with every kind of vermin. “The city is dry and ill-supplied with water. The streets are nothing but old lanes,” wrote one shocked visitor. “The houses [are] mean with few better ones among them.” Not surprisingly, pestilence was a constant fear. Intermittently, plagues would sweep through the city, killing far more Athenians than armed conflict; one epidemic in 430–428 B.C., according to Thucydides, carried off a quarter of the Athenian armed forces. 15

     

THE GREEK DIASPORA
     
    Given the harsh conditions at home, it was natural for Greeks to seek a better life elsewhere. In contrast with the environs around Babylon or even the Phoenician city-states, the country surrounding the Greek city-states was generally unproductive; the overgrazed and depleted Greek countryside was increasingly incapable of supporting the growing population. To bring in new sources of food and raw materials, Greek cities planted colonies from the west coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) to Sicily and southern Italy. By 600 B.C., the Greek influence had reached the Gallic coast at Massilia, modern-day Marseilles, and as far as the Catalonian coast. 16
    At one time the Greeks had looked down on the mercantile-minded Phoenicians, but necessity forced them to outdo them as traders. The change could be felt in the heart of the Greek cities. The agora, once simply a place of assembly, had evolved by the fifth century B.C.—to the dismay of some philosophers and aristocrats—into a large, boisterous, and