Quick questions on Power, authority and historiography in Greece 404 BC to the death of Philip II: HSC Ancient History

Behind these events lies a larger question that historians call the "crisis of the polis". On one reading, the city-state itself was exhausted by the fourth century: constant warfare, the spread of professional mercenary armies (dramatised by the March of the Ten Thousand, 401 to 399 BC), internal class conflict (stasis), and economic strain suggested that the polis had outlived its capacity to defend its own independence, so that some larger unit was bound to replace it. On another reading, this is overstated. Historians such as Mogens Hansen and the wider study of the Greek city-state argue that the polis remained a vigorous and adaptable institution well into the Hellenistic age, and that what failed was not civic life but the specific project of holding a Greece-wide hegemony together.