— SUB Urban, Chapter 1

Deriving from Classical Society, Romans were organized into the polis. The Roman polis was like the polis of Athens and the polis of Sparta. You had your rights in Rome. The polis of Athens held a lot of territory outside the city, the polis, itself. These were SUB-urban areas, areas under the control of the City, the Polis. But to vote you had to go to the polis.

This did not become too much of a problem until Rome began conquering huge hunks of territory hundreds of miles from the polis. When Saint Paul claimed the rights of his Roman citizenship, they all derived from his right TO GO TO ROME and appeal directly to the Emperor, which originally was the right to appeal to the Senate.

IN ROME.

Thus “civilization” means “city-ization,” but it could also be called “polisization.”

There was a long and vicious fight by the members of the Latin League for Roman citizenship. Once they obtained it, Roman citizenship began the slide into being extended in the fourth century to everybody inside Roman territory who was not a slave.

A number of Italian cities were founded as “colonies” of Athens and other Greek cities. They had a lot of citizens of the colonizing polis, but rights could be exercised inside the colony city as well as in the parental polis.

Sparta said it needed no walls, because its shields were its walls. The exception proves the rule. The polis was a fixed area within walls like Medieval castles and cities. SUBurban areas looked to the polis when invasion came, and it came very, very often. So the entire Classical Civilization developed in a DEFENSIVE mode as wave after wave of Northern Invasion swept over it.

Once the Northern Invaders took over the polis, it began to have an OFFENSIVE outlook.

Doric and Ionian invaders who took over each polis were, in the centuries following, fighting to hold their own polis, a.k.a “city-state” — though there was no other form of state in Classical Times — against other polises, poli — while simultaneously founding colonies in far-away Italy and Sicily. In the same way, European countries were fighting to stay alive in Europe at the same time that their citizens were discovering and taking colonies thousands of miles away.

But the basic Classical Civilization was based on loyalty to an area inside a wall. The last third of their history they had to develop some means of spreading that concept to an expanding set of empires. That was exactly like trying to eat soup with chopsticks.

Nobody had a tradition that was less ready to take on a giant empire than the polis system Rome inherited.