Geography and the Population of City-states
The geography of Greece greatly influenced the process by which this radically new way
of organizing human communities came about. The severely mountainous terrain of the
mainland meant that city-states were often physically separated by significant barriers
to easy communication, thus reinforcing the tendency of city-states to develop
separately and not to cooperate with one another. A single Greek island could be home to
multiple city-states maintaining their independence from one another; the large island
of
Lesbos1, for example,
was the home for five different city-states. Since few city-states controlled enough
arable land to grow food sufficient to feed a large body of citizens, polis
communities no larger than several hundred to a couple of thousand people were normal
even after the population of Greece rose dramatically at the end of the Dark Age. By the
fifth century Athens had grown to a size of perhaps forty thousand adult male citizens
and a total population, including slaves and other non-citizens, of several hundred
thousand people, but this was a rare exception to the generally small size of Greek
city-states. A population as large as that of classical Athens could be supported only
by the regular
importation of food2 from abroad, which had to be financed by trade and other revenues.
