Towns of ancient Greece

The archetypical settlement in ancient Greece was the self-governing city state called the polis (Greek: πόλις), but other types of settlement occurred.

Kome

A kome (Greek: κώμη) was typically a village that was also a political unit. The translation is inexact, but according to Thucydides, Sparta, though it was a polis, resembled four unwalled villages. Similarly, a kome could be a neighbourhood within a larger polis or its own rural settlement. Thucydides mused that the polis had developed from the kome.^[1]

Katoikia

A katoikia (

Colonies

Many of the poleis in ancient Greece established colonies, of which many went on to be fully independent poleis of their own. These include:

Emporia

• An Emporion (Greek: ἐμπόριον) was a Greek trading-colony and could be a self-contained settlement or a section of either another Greek polis or of a non-Greek town. Emporia were usually found in ports and could be considered to be the reverse of a politeum.

Cleruchy

• A
  independence. Instead, it remained part of the mother city's polis, with citizenship
  being retained by the settlers, and it may have functioned like a kome.