A Great Civilization Many people believe that the greatest of all the civilizations of the ancient world was the civilization of Greece. However, it is a little misleading to speak about ancient Greece as though it were a single civilization. Ancient Greece was not a unified country. It was a collection of independent city-states. The ancient Greek word for city-state was polis (/poh* lihs/). A typical polis would have included a town or a small city and the farmlands surrounding it. Most Greek city-states had a population of no more than twenty thousand and covered an area of only a hundred or so square miles.