John Ma

My book of the year is John Ma’s Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (Princeton), a meticulously researched history of the peculiar political phenomenon of the autonomous city state, ruled by an elite class of peers who shared resources to achieve common goals. Ma’s magnum opus offers a persuasive account of how the polis came to be, and the book does well to dwell on its liberatory political possibilities without losing show more sight of the fact the polis was also ‘a patriarchy, an enslavement society, a nativist organization, and a polity haunted by the model of an urban aristocracy’. An extraordinary achievement.

Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/books-year-2024-part-1

Mirela Ivanova is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield and author of Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press) show less

Naturally, this is a rather specialized book, focusing on the unique political and cultural form of government that Ancient Greece established: the polis. A translation as city-state is certainly not wrong, but it truly does not do justice to the specificity of the Greek poleis. Through a very extensive and in-depth sketch of the evolution of the polis, John Ma (Prof. Columbia University, US) attempts to highlight this specificity. For me, his merit lies primarily in the fact that he also show more fully focuses on the period after the "Golden" 5th century BCE, even making the surprising observation that the true heyday of the Greek polis, as a form of government, only came after 300 BCE, thus during the Hellenistic period. As mentioned, this is a specialized book, very in-depth and academically conceived, and also containing a fair amount of political jargon. But John Ma's work is so thorough that I am certain this book will set the standard in studies of ancient Greece for years to come. I elaborate on a few aspects in more detail in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7214016871. show less