It has been a commonplace that societies, states and cultures are the units of analysis that historians have to use. I will restrict myself to the treatment of the notion of society in this context. Since the nineteenth century, it has been accepted wisdom that societies are distinct entities with their own rules, laws and borders, and they are the units of analysis that historians use. One could study the relations or interactions between different societies, but one still studies relations and interactions between distinct and definable entities. Is this view justified? I believe not, and in fact it has had a very pernicious influence on the study of Greek history. We hear about the contrast between aristocracy and the polis; between polis and the ethnos; between the citizen-hoplite and the mercenary; between Greece and the East. These distinctions emanate from a static and internalist view of society. I want then to pose two distinct yet interrelated questions: can we speak of the polis as a kind of society? And is the polis an adequate framework for the analysis of the social history of ancient Greek communities?

What is ancient Greek society then? Let us accept for a moment the usual view that a society is coterminous with the boundaries of a polity. What is Athenian society? Is it the society of the Athenian polis? There are reasons to doubt it.