"Tribal Poleis" in Northwestern Greece.

The polis model, both as an urban center and as a political community, represented a key-element in the evolution of the Northwestern ethne into federal states. In such development, the polis played an important role both as an external factor, for the presence of Corinthian and Elean colonies in the coastal area and offshore islands, and an internal, for the birth and growth of urban settlements (here called “tribal poleis”) in ethnos territories. The present paper focuses mainly on the latter, with the aim of determining whether it is possible to find out substantial differences between the “normal” Greek poleis and those tribal poleis that arose in the Northwestern Greece mostly in the course of the Fourth century. The analysis of some significant cases studies (Stratos, Phoinike, Kassopa, Kallipolis) leads us to assume that such peculiarities did exist, and can be mostly detected in the territorial control patterns and in the self-representation as political communities, which characterized the tribal poleis in a different way than the normal Greek poleis.