Laudator Temporis Acti

Archilochus, fragment 20 West (tr. J.M. Edmonds):

I bewail the misfortunes of Thasos, not of Magnesia.

κλαίω τὰ Θασίων, οὐ τὰ Μαγνήτων κακά.

More literally Thasians ... Magnesians.

David Whitehead, "Polis-toponyms as personal entities (in Thucydides and elsewhere)," Museum Helveticum 53.1 (1996) 1-11 (at 2-3):

3. The doctrine in question dates back at least to the early 1960s, when it was enunciated by Moses Finley as follows: "An ancient Greek could only express the idea of Athens as a political unit by saying 'the Athenians'; the single word 'Athens' never meant anything but a spot on the map, a purely and narrowly geographical notion. One travelled to Athens; one made war against the Athenians"⁷. Two decades later came a fuller and (typographically) more emphatic declaration from him: "In ancient Greek such statements as 'Corinth decided' or 'Athens declared war against Sparta' were always formulated as 'the Corinthians decided', 'the Athenians declared war on the Spartans'. Athens, Corinth, Sparta were geographical place-names, not the names of political communities. Because the Athenians held as their territory the whole of the district of Attica, we risk ambiguity by saying 'Athens did this or that', 'Anaxagoras visited Athens', whereas the Greek practice was specific and clear on this score. More important for our purposes, it was psychologically and politically precise"⁸.

Mogens Herman Hansen, likewise, has several times pressed the same distinction: "Grækerne identiftcerede primært State med borgerne: stat = folk. Den græske historie handler om athenerne, lakedaimonierne og korinthierne. Det er aldrig Athen og Lakedaimon, der fører krig, altid athenerne og lakedaimonierne". Thus Hansen in 1978⁹; and subsequent (English) versions have been essentially unchanged¹⁰.

4. Such a view, then, has been repeatedly uttered by Finley and Hansen, echoed by others¹¹, taught to students (experto credite), and never, to my knowledge, challenged¹². It is orthodoxy on the subject.

7 M.I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks (London 1963) 35.

8 M.I. Finley in M.I. Finley (ed.), The Legacy of Greece: a new appraisal (Oxford 1984) 10.

9 M.H. Hansen, Det Athenske Demokrati i 4. århundrede f.Kr I: staten, folket, forfatningen (Copenhagen 1978) 15.

10 M.H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford 1991) 58: "... the Greeks identified the State primarily with its people — a State is a people ... in all the sources, from documents and historical accounts to poetry and legend, it is the people who are stressed and not the territory ... It was never Athens and Sparta that went to war but always 'the Athenians and the Lakedaimonians'." The same verbatim in Hansen op.cit. (n. 3 above) 7-8. Thuc. 1.1.1 (evidently τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων) was the supporting example cited in 1978, 5.25.1 (evidently τὴν ξυμμαχίαν τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων καὶ τῶν Ἀθηναίων) in 1991/1993.

11 Including the present writer — see M.H. Crawford/D. Whitehead, Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge 1983) 4: "the polis was at the centre of a man's life, consisting above all of the men who composed its citizen body and only secondarily involving a geographical location — the Athenians, the Spartans, and not Athens, Sparta". The words are Crawford's, in this instance, but at the time Whitehead was in full agreement. See also S. Hornblower, Thucydides (London 1987) 181, who refers to "the undoubted linguistic fact that in political contexts the Greek for Athens is, as everyone who learns to write a Greek prose is taught, not Athenai but hoi Athenaioi".

12 It fell outside the brief of W. Gawantka, Die sogenannte Polis (Stuttgart 1985).

In the rest of his brilliant article Whitehead shows that the rule is not ironclad, and that there are many counter-examples in Greek prose.