I have written several articles about the Polis -- mainly focused on pieces of its history. It’s hard to put the tell the whole story given the space limits of a blog, but I’ve decided to make the attempt here because the Polis is so important to Western Civilization as the model for modern political systems and Democracy. We’ll conserve space by sticking to the main inflection points in its history – the forces that propelled its development forward.
One more thing. We discuss the Polis generically until the rise of Athens because its evolution occurred across the Greek peninsula. One of the reasons for the success of the Polis was the number of cities and towns that served as laboratories for its development. Eventually Athens would become the standard and take the structure of the Polis to its endpoint.