The Polis as the Engine of the Intellect – Part I
The Polis was one of the two great outcomes of the Greek Archaic Age, along with colonization. While the former was an expression of the Greek desire to expand trade and reach the outside world, building of the city-state was far more important to the Greeks and western man as a whole because:
The Polis was the first governmental structure that supported the free expression of the human mind to pursue an intellectual foundation for his existence.
We will take the next couple of posts to describe how this happened.
We start in the Archaic Period – the Revolutionary Portion where the Greek people were in a struggle to create a cultural model which would remove the individual from the tribe and overcome the clan-based existence which had constrained man’s ability to reason since he came into being.