Ancient Greece was not a unified nation, but a collection
of poli. Poli is the plural of polis, a word
often translated as city, but a polis is much more. When we think of a
city, we generally think of a place. A Greek polis consisted of a small
walled area that was generally no larger than a few city blocks,
the farmland that surrounded it, and most importantly, the people who
lived there. Today we think of the people who live in a place as citizens,
but to the ancient Greeks the people were as much of the poli as the land
or the buildings. The word politics is derived from the Greek polis.