Maritime Dynamics and the Polis in Hellenistic Asia Minor (323-c.133 BCE

This dissertation examines the role of the maritime environment within the polis. The polis, the quintessential Greek socio-political organization from the 8th c. BCE onward, was comprised of the asty and chora, in opposition to the eschatia (the area "wild and untamed by humans"). Included in Aristotle's description (Politics 7.5.2-5) of the ideal polis, harbors -- from their liminal position between city and sea -- straddled the metaphorical and physical boundary between civilized and uncivilized places; as such, their continued control was critical to oversight of the city. Nevertheless, they facilitated trade, communication, and transportation networks, so harbors also served as important mediators within the settlement and between the settlement and larger Mediterranean culture. To evaluate the role of the maritime environment in the polis, I examine the physical and spatial relationship between harbors and urban planning from a seaward perspective. Using a theoretical and methodological framework influenced by urbanism, social space theory, and Mediterranean, maritime, and coastal studies, I take a holistic approach to the maritime environment that emphasizes the interaction of coast, islands, land, and sea. I adopt the idea that an agora in grid-planned cities functioned as a "hinge," because it connected the various sectors of the settlement, thereby reflecting its pivotal role in the public life of the polis, and use it to conceptualize harbors as similar in form and function to agoras. Focusing on the west coast of Asia Minor, I use literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources to reconstruct and to analyse the physical and spatial layouts of the harbor-city matrices of Miletos and Rhodes, by analysing patterns of spatial access and lines-of-sight built into the natural environment between open sea, harbor, and urban interior. Applying my theory and methodology to Miletos and Rhodes, I conclude that city-states incorporate maritime space into their territory as a mechanism of power and control. They created a "maritime chora" and integrating harbors into the asty or terrestrial chora. A maritime chora was created at Miletos and Rhodes, by populating the adjacent coast, islands, land, and sea with shrines, temples, and altars. Since the monuments incorporated myth-historical figures and events from the cities' past, civic identity was built into the seascape, setting up a narrative for seafarers before they entered the harbor and urban centre, which increased connectivity between city and sea. In doing so, both mainland Miletos and insular Rhodes expanded their territorial control, linking the cities to regional and "international" networks of the southeast Aegean Sea. Miletos and Rhodes used architecture and urban planning to draw their harbors into their territory. Both harbor and agoras were demarcated from the larger urban plan with monumental and utilitarian architecture that emphasized their interior space and facilitated the socio-political, economic, and religious activities carried out there. In conjunction with its maritime chora, such an arrangement increased connectivity and access between the larger seascape and urban interior, drawing the maritime environment into Miletos and Rhodes' territory and emphasizing the importance of seafaring for the city.