Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux I have a weird question. I decided to research the governments of various ancient Greek poleis, but I'm having trouble finding any details on the government of anything but Athens or Sparta. I assume the second-tier and below poleis didn't all have the same...

...exact system of government, but all I've been able to find so far is generalizations about ancient Greece as a whole and the occasional vague label. "Thebes was an oligarchy controlled by land-owning families," that kind of thing. [cont again]

Do you know of anywhere I could look to find this sort of detail? Books or blogs or whatever? Or is the reason that I can't find details on most Greek poleis's governments that we don't have much evidence of what they were like? Sorry to bother you about this.

So the easy answer is that we know less about these poleis; Sparta and Athens get most of the attention in our sources. Often, charting the governments of smaller poleis falls to epigraphy (the study of inscriptions) and thus gets technical and beginner-unfriendly quite fast.

Good news: There *is* a one-stop-shop for basic details on every known Polis. It's M.H Hanson et al, *An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis* (2004) Bad News: a print version can run you almost $1k, the kindle version is $400 and your library probably doesn't have it.