, in plural , is the word the ancient Greeks used to describe their principal type of state and community and the most common of all nouns in ancient Greek. In Archaic and Classical sources there are over 11,000 attestations of the word, and they show that it was used in two different senses: (1) town (sometimes including the hinterland) and (2) state (sometimes including the territory). Often it carries both senses simultaneously and denotes both the state and its urban centre. The (1993–2005) conducted a number of investigations into the use and meanings of the term in all Archaic and Classical sources to find out what the Greeks thought a was. The present volume is a thoroughly revised and updated comprehensive publication of all these studies, to which four new studies have been added. They show that the two different meanings of the word are connected through their reference: with very few exceptions every town was the urban centre of a state, and conversely: virtually every state had an urban centre called a in the sense of town.weiterlesen