Archaic Greece in brief. Archaic Greece

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION OF THE MOSCOW REGION

MOSCOW STATE REGIONAL UNIVERSITY

Historical and Philological Institute

FACULTY OF HISTORY, POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LAW

Department of History of the Ancient World and the Middle Ages

Coursework on the topic:

Greece in the archaic era and its influence on the world.

Completed by: Klimenko I.E.

2nd year student d/o

Scientific adviser:

Ph.D., Associate Professor A.S. Klemeshov

Moscow 2014

Introduction……………………………………………………………... 3

Writing………………………………………………………….. 7

Poetry……………………………………………………………………………… 7

Religion and philosophy……………………………………………………………. 10

Architecture and Sculpture……………………………………………………………13

Vase painting………………………………………………………15

Greek alphabet……………………………………………………..15

Olympic Games………………………………………………………18

Historiography…………………………………………………………. 21

Mathematics…………………………………………………………….. 23

Theater………………………………………………………………………………………23

Coins…………………………………………………………………………………..24

Conclusion

List of references

Introduction

Archaic period in Greek history(8-5. BC) - a term adopted among historians since the 18th century. Appeared during the study of Greek art and originally belonged only to the times of the Dark Ages and classical Greece. Later, the term “archaic period” was extended not only to the history of art, but also to the social life of Greece, since during this period, following the “dark ages,” a significant expansion of political theory began, the rise of democracy, philosophy, theater, poetry, and the revival of written language. language (the emergence of the Greek alphabet to replace that forgotten during the “Dark Ages” Linear B).

This era became a time of rapid and active development of Ancient Greece, during which all the necessary conditions and prerequisites were made for the future amazing takeoff and prosperity. Profound changes are taking place in almost every area of life. Over the course of three centuries, ancient society made a transition from village to city, from tribal and patriarchal relations to relations of classical slavery.

The city-state, the Greek polis became the main form of socio-political organization public life. Society, as it were, tries all possible forms of government and government (i.e., such a search for a political institution) - monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, aristocratic and democratic republics.

The rapid development of agriculture leads to the release of people, which activates the growth of handicrafts in the country. Since this does not solve the “employment problem,” the colonization of neighboring and distant lands, which began in the Achaean period, is intensifying, as a result of which Greece is expanding territorially to enormous proportions. The economic surge contributes to an increase in the market and trade operations, whose main support is monetary circulation system. Appeared coinage, which accelerated these processes.

There have been great achievements and victories in the formation of spiritual culture. An absolute role in its development was played by the emergence alphabetic letter, which became the main achievement of the culture of archaic Greece. It was made on the basis of Phoenician writing and is surprisingly simple and accessible, which made it possible to create an extremely effective education system, thanks to which there were no illiterates in ancient Greece, which was also a huge success.

During the archaic period, the main ethical standards and values ancient society, in which the main thing is a sense of collectivism, combined with an agonistic (competitive) principle, with the formation of individual and personal rights, and the spirit of freedom. Patriotism and citizenship play a special role. Protecting one's policy began to be considered the highest honor of a citizen. At the same time, the symbol of a person in whom spirit and body are in harmony is also born.

The incarnation of this image was influenced by those that arose in 776 BC. Olympic Games. They took place every four years in the city of Olympia and lasted for five days, during which a “sacred peace” was observed, stopping all military actions. Those who took 1st place at the games enjoyed great success and received significant social guarantees (tax exemption, lifelong pension, permanent seats in the theater and at holidays). The winner of the games three times ordered his statue from a famous sculptor and placed it in the sacred grove surrounding the main shrine of the city of Olympia and all of Greece - the Temple of Zeus.

IN archaic era such symbols of ancient culture arose as philosophy And spider. Their father was Thales, for whom they are not yet strictly separated from each other and are within the framework of a single natural philosophy. One of the founders of ancient philosophy and philosophy in general as a science is also the legendary Pythagoras, whose science takes the form mathematics, already has a completely independent meaning.

The real flourishing in this era occurs in poetry. The greatest monuments of ancient literature were Homer’s epic poems “Iliad” and “Odyssey”. A little later, Homer was created by another famous Greek poet, Hesiod. His poems "Theogony", i.e. the genealogy of the gods, and the “Catalog of Women” complemented the work of Homer, and ancient poetry acquired its classic, ideal image.

Among other poets, the works of Archilochus, the founder of lyric poetry, deserve special mention; his poems are filled with personal suffering and experiences, combining the difficulties and hardships of life. This also includes the work of the lyricist Sappho, the great ancient poetess from the island of Lesbos, who experienced the feelings of a loving, jealous and suffering woman. The work of Anacreon, who glorified everything beautiful: beauty, feelings, joy, passion and fun of life, had a great influence on European and Russian poetry, in particular on A.S. Pushkin.

Artistic culture reaches a high level in the archaic era. At this time it develops architecture, standing on two types of order - Doric and Ionic. The leading type of construction is the sacred temple as the abode of God. The temple of Apollo in Delphi becomes the most famous and revered. There is also monumental sculpture - first wooden and then stone. Two types are most popular: a naked male statue, known as a kouros (the figure of a young athlete), and a draped female statue, an example of which was the kora (an upright girl).

The main elements of the urban structure of the Archaic period were the acropolis (sanctuary) and agora (shopping center), surrounded by residential areas of houses. The main place in the development of cities was occupied by temples, which were first built from mud brick and wood, then from limestone, and from the end of the 6th century. BC. - made of marble. An architectural order was created in its Doric and Ionic variants. The harsh, somewhat ponderous Doric style is characterized by a strict, geometrically correct capital columns. In the Ionic, more magnificent style, the column acts not only as a support, but also as a decorative element; it is characterized by a capital with curls - volutes, a more complex base, and is much more elegant than a Doric column. Among the buildings of the Doric order, the most famous were the Temple of Hera in Olympia, and the Ionic order - the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus.

During the archaic period, a synthesis of architecture and sculpture occurs - the outside of the temples is decorated with reliefs, and statues of the deity to whom the temple is dedicated are placed inside. The figures depict not only gods, but also mythical heroes (Hercules, Perseus, etc.). Greek ceramics from the Archaic era amazes with its richness and variety of forms, and the beauty of its style. Particularly notable are the Corinthian vases painted in the so-called orientalizing style, i.e. oriental style, which is distinguished by the beauty and whimsy of pictorial decoration, and Attic black-figure and later red-figure vases depicting the everyday life of people. A peculiar archaic culture laid the foundation for the flourishing of classical culture, which played such a significant role in the development of world civilization. Typical examples created by sculptors of that time were sculptures of naked young men - kouros and chastely draped girls - kora. The faces of the sculptures have individuality (“Cleobis and Biton” by Polymedes), the poses were given staticity, intense restraint, nobility and majesty. In the VI century. BC. temple decorations appeared. The motives for the created compositions were traditional, artistically modified myths, historical events described by Homer and their participants. Shade played a big role in sculpture. Individual parts of the kouros' body and clothing were painted. Sometimes precious stones were inserted into the eye sockets. In vase paintings in the 6th century. BC. the black-figure style (founder Exekius) is known - black varnish was applied to red clay, as well as the red-figure style (founder Epictetus) - painted ceramics, in which the images remained in the color of baked clay, and the background of the vessel was covered with black varnish. The approach to the second style had artists turning to dissimilar everyday subjects (“The Girl Heading to the Bath” from the masterful work of Euphronius

Religion. The Greek religion still played a connecting role in society. The image of Apollo in Delphi played an important meaning. This cult of the Delphic sacred college in the Greek state was very large, but had a purely cultic character, since the priests did not participate in government administration. In the policies, elected priests were in charge of sacraments and rituals, while at the same time providing religious education to citizens. The cults of Dionysus and Demeter played an important role in Greek religion.

The purpose of the course work is to show how the world has changed with the archaic, how the archaic has contributed to the development of art and how the whole world has changed with it, having gone through the path of experiments both in mathematics and in philosophy and in art too.

Achievements ancient Greek civilization formed the basis European culture

Early Greece

Turn of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC is the most important stage in the history of Europe. It was then that societies divided into classes emerged in the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula and on the adjacent islands.

Around 2500 BC Large metallurgical centers are being created on many islands of the Aegean Sea and on the mainland. Significant progress has been observed in ceramic production, where the potter's wheel began to be used. Thanks to the development of navigation, contacts between different regions are intensifying, and technical and cultural innovations are spreading. Equally noticeable was the progress in agriculture associated with the creation of a new multicultural type (the so-called Mediterranean triad), which was based on the cultivation of cereals, primarily barley, grapes and olives. The proximity of ancient civilizations of the Near East also had a great influence on the development of this region.

Painted vessel from the Old Palace of Phaistos. Around the XIX-XVIII centuries. BC.

The initial stages of the formation of class society and the state in this region have not yet been sufficiently studied, and this is mainly due to the fact that researchers have relatively few sources at their disposal. Archaeological materials relating to this period cannot illuminate political history, the nature of social relations, and the oldest writing system that appeared in Crete (the so-called Linear A) has not yet been deciphered. Subsequently, the Greeks of the Balkan Peninsula adapted this letter to their language (the so-called Linear B). It was deciphered only in 1953 by English scientists M. Ventris and J. Chadwick. But all texts are business reporting documents, and therefore the volume of information provided by them is limited. Certain information about the society of the 2nd millennium BC. preserved the famous Greek poems “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, as well as some myths. However, it is difficult to interpret these sources historically, since reality in them is artistically transformed, ideas and realities of different times are fused together and it is extremely difficult to isolate what undoubtedly dates back to the 2nd millennium BC.

As some researchers believe, it is quite possible that the first centers of statehood appeared on the Balkan Peninsula as early as the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. But the process of formation of class society and statehood in the southern part of the Balkan region was interrupted by the invasion of tribes from the north. Around XXII century. BC. Here the Greek tribes themselves appeared, calling themselves Achaeans or Danaans. Old, pre-Greek population, ethnicity which has not been established, was partially displaced or destroyed by aliens, and partially assimilated. The conquerors stood at a lower level of development, and this circumstance affected a certain difference in the destinies of the two parts of the region: the mainland and the island of Crete. Crete was not affected by the mentioned process and therefore for several centuries represented the zone of the most rapid socio-economic, political and cultural progress.

Minoan civilization

The Bronze Age civilization that arose in Crete is usually called Minoan. This name was given to it by the English archaeologist A. Evans, who first discovered monuments of this civilization during excavations of the palace in Knossos. Greek mythological tradition considered Knossos the residence of King Minos, the powerful ruler of Crete and many other islands of the Aegean. Here, Queen Pasiphae gave birth to the Minotaur (half-man, half-bull), for whom Daedalus built a labyrinth at Knossos.

In the second half of the 3rd - beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, apparently, all the lands suitable for agriculture - the leading branch of the economy of Crete - were developed. Cattle breeding probably also played an important role. Significant progress was observed in the craft. The growth of labor productivity and the creation of surplus product led to the fact that part of it could be used in intercommunity exchange. For Crete this was of particular significance, since the island lay at the crossroads of ancient sea routes.

At the turn of the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC. The first states emerge on Crete. At first there were four of them with palace centers in Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia, and Kato Zakro. It is the appearance of palaces that testifies to the class character of society and the development of statehood.

The era of "palace civilization" in Crete spans approximately 600 years: from 2000 to 1400 BC. Around 1700 BC palaces were destroyed. Some scientists believe that this was caused by natural disasters (most likely a huge earthquake), others see this as the result of social conflicts, a consequence of the struggle of the masses. However, the outbreak of the disaster briefly delayed development. Soon, on the site of the destroyed palaces, new ones appeared, surpassing the old ones in monumentality and luxury.

We know a little more about the era of “new palaces”. For example, the four palaces mentioned above, a number of settlements, and necropolises have been well explored. The Knossos palace excavated by A. Evans is the best studied - a grandiose structure on a common platform (about 1 hectare). Although only one floor has survived to this day, it is clear that the building was two, and possibly three, stories high. The palace had an excellent water supply and sewerage system, terracotta baths in special rooms, thoughtful ventilation and lighting. Many household items are made at a high artistic level, some are made from precious metals. The walls of the palace premises were decorated with magnificent paintings that reproduced the surrounding nature or scenes from the life of its inhabitants. Most of the ground floor was occupied by storerooms in which wine, olive oil, grain, local crafts, as well as goods coming from distant countries were stored. The palace also housed craft workshops, where jewelers, potters, and vase painters worked.

The question of the social and political organization of Cretan society is solved by scientists in different ways, but based on the available data, it can be assumed that the basis of the economic life of the state was the palace economy. The Cretan society of its heyday was probably a theocracy: the functions of king and high priest were combined in one person. Slaves had already appeared, but their number remained insignificant.

The apogee of the Minoan civilization falls on the 16th - first half of the 15th centuries. BC. At the beginning of this period, the whole of Crete was united under the rule of the Knossos rulers. Greek tradition considers King Minos the first "lord of the sea" - he built a large fleet, destroyed piracy and established his dominance in the Aegean Sea. At the end of the 15th century. BC. A catastrophe struck Crete, dealing a mortal blow to the Minoan civilization. Obviously, it occurred due to a huge volcanic eruption on the island of Thira. Most of the settlements and palaces were destroyed. Taking advantage of this, the Achaeans invaded the island from the Balkans. From the leading center of the Mediterranean, Crete turns into a province of Achaean Greece.

Achaean civilization

The heyday of the civilization of Achaean Greece began in the 15th-13th centuries. BC. The center of this civilization was obviously Argolis. Expanding, it then covered the entire Peloponnese, Central Greece (Attica, Boeotia, Phocis), a significant part of Northern Greece (Thessaly), as well as many islands of the Aegean Sea.

As in Crete, palaces played a vital role in the life of society. The most significant of them were discovered in Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Athens, Thebes, Orkhomenes, Iolka. But the Achaean palaces differ sharply from the Cretan ones: they are all powerful citadels. The most impressive example is the citadel of Tiryns, the walls of which are made of huge limestone blocks, sometimes weighing 12 tons. The thickness of the walls exceeded 4.5 m, and the height only in the preserved part was 7.5 m.

Like the Cretan ones, the Achaean palaces have the same layout, but they are characterized by clear symmetry. The Pylos Palace is the best studied by archaeologists. It was two-story and consisted of several dozen rooms: ceremonial, sacred, chambers of the king and queen, their households: warehouses where grain, wine, olive oil, and household items were stored; utility rooms. An important part of the palace was the arsenal with a supply of weapons. The palace had an established water supply and sewerage system. The walls of many rooms were decorated with paintings, often with battle scenes.

Of exceptional importance for the history of the 2nd millennium BC. present the results of excavations begun by Greek archaeologists in 1967 on the island of Thira, the southernmost of the Cyclades group of islands. Under a layer of volcanic ash, the remains of a city that was destroyed by a volcanic eruption were found here. Excavations revealed cobbled streets, large buildings, of which the second and even third floors with staircases leading to them have been preserved. The paintings on the walls of the buildings are amazing: blue monkeys, stylized antelopes, two fighting boys, one of them has a special glove on his hand. Against a background of red, yellow and green rocks covered with grass and moss, red lilies on yellow stems and swallows flying above them. Apparently, this is how the artist painted a picture of the arrival of spring, and the painting makes it possible to judge what this flourishing island looked like before disaster befell it. The same kind of houses the Tirenians of that time lived in and what ships they sailed on can be judged from another painting, obviously depicting a panorama of the city and the sea with many ships.

Achaean economy

The basis of the economic structure of Achaean society was the palace economy, which included large craft workshops - processing agricultural products, spinning and sewing, metallurgical and metalworking, producing tools and weapons. The palace economy also controlled the main types of craft activities throughout the territory; metalworking was under especially strict control.

The owner of the land, as follows from documents in the Pylos archive, was the palace. All lands were divided into two categories: privately owned and communal. The lowest stratum of society were slaves, but there were relatively few of them, and they belonged mainly to the palace. Slaves varied in their status, and there was no clear boundary between slaves and freemen. Formally free community members constituted an important social group. They had their own plots of land, house, and household, but were economically and politically dependent on the palace. The dominant layer included, first of all, a developed bureaucratic apparatus - central and local. The state was headed by a king (“vanaka”), who had political and sacred functions.

Political events

The political history of Achaean Greece is poorly known. Some scholars write about a unified Achaean power under the hegemony of Mycenae. However, it is more correct to assume that each palace is the center of an independent state, between which military conflicts often arose. This, however, did not exclude the possibility of a temporary unification of the Achaean kingdoms. Apparently, this was the case during the campaign against Troy, the events of which formed the basis of the Iliad and Odyssey. It is possible that the Trojan War was one of the episodes of the widespread colonization movement that began in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. e. Achaean settlements appeared on the western and southern coasts of Asia Minor, the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus were actively populated, Achaean trading posts were opened in Sicily and Southern Italy. The Achaeans participated in that powerful onslaught on the coastal countries of the Near East, which is usually called the movement of the “sea peoples”.

In the 13th century BC. prosperous Achaean states began to feel the approach of terrible events. In many places, new fortifications are being built and old ones are being repaired. As evidenced by archaeological excavations, the disaster occurred at the very end of the 13th century. BC. Almost all the palaces and most of the settlements were destroyed. The agony of the Achaean civilization lasted about a hundred years, and at the end of the 12th century. BC. The last Achaean palace in Iolka perished. The population was partially destroyed, partially settled in unsuitable areas for habitation, and even emigrated from the country altogether.

Scientists have long been searching for the causes of these fateful events in Greek history. There are a number of hypotheses explaining the destruction of the Achaean civilization. The most convincing, in our opinion, is the following. At the end of the 13th century. BC. moved to Greece northern peoples, including the Dorian Greeks, as well as other tribes. However, there was no mass migration then, and only later did the Dorians gradually begin to penetrate into the devastated territory. The old Achaean population survived only in some areas, for example in Attica. The Achaeans, forced out of Greece, settled eastward, occupying the islands of the Aegean Sea, the western coast of Asia Minor and Cyprus.

Dark Ages of Greece

The birth of the foundations of Greek society

Important changes took place in craft production, primarily in metallurgy and metalworking. This is when iron begins to be widely used. The development of this metal, the production process of which was simpler in comparison with bronze, had enormous consequences. The need for production cooperation of a number of families disappeared, and opportunities arose for the economic independence of the patriarchal family, centralized production, storage and distribution of iron ceased to justify itself, and the economic need for a bureaucratic apparatus, characteristic of all Achaean states, disappeared.

The leading figure in the Greek economy was the free farmer. A somewhat different situation developed in those areas where the Dorian conquerors conquered the local Achaean population, for example in Sparta. The Dorians conquered the Eurotas valley and made the local population dependent on them.

The main form of organization of society was the polis as a special form of community. The citizens of the polis were the heads of the patriarchal families that were part of it. Each family represented an economically independent unit, which determined their political equality. And although the emerging nobility sought to bring the community under its control, this process was still far from complete. The polis community performed two important functions:

protection of land and population from the claims of neighbors
regulation of intra-community relations.

Only policies such as Sparta, where there was a conquered population, in this era acquired the features of primitive state formations.

Thus, by the end of the period under review, Greece was a world of hundreds of small and minute communities-polises, uniting peasant farmers. It was a world where the main economic unit was the patriarchal family, economically self-sufficient and almost independent, with a simple life and lack of external connections, a world where the top of society had not yet sharply separated from the bulk of the population, where the exploitation of man by man was just emerging. With primitive forms of social organization, there were still no forces capable of forcing the bulk of producers to give away excess product. But this was precisely the economic potential of Greek society, which revealed itself in the next historical era and ensured its rapid rise.

Archaic Greece

The archaic period in the history of Greece is usually called the VIII-VI centuries. BC. According to some researchers, this is the time of the most intensive development of ancient society. Indeed, over the course of three centuries many most important discoveries, which determined the nature of the technical basis of ancient society, those socio-economic and political phenomena developed that gave ancient society a certain specificity in comparison with other slaveholding societies:

classic slavery;
monetary circulation and market system;
the main form of political organization is the polis;
the concept of popular sovereignty and democratic form of government.

At the same time, the main ethical norms and principles of morality, aesthetic ideals were developed that influenced the ancient world throughout its history until the emergence of Christianity. Finally, during this period the main phenomena of ancient culture arose:

philosophy and science,
main genres of literature,
theater,
order architecture,
sport.

To more clearly imagine the dynamics of the development of society in the archaic period, we present the following comparison:

Around 800 BC e. The Greeks lived in a limited territory of the south of the Balkan Peninsula, the islands of the Aegean Sea and the western coast of Asia Minor.	Around 500 BC e. they already occupy the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to the Levant and from Africa to the Crimea.
Around 800 BC e. Greece is essentially a rural world, a world of self-sufficient small communities.	By 500 BC. e. Greece is no longer a mass big cities with local markets, monetary relations powerfully invade the economy, trade relations cover the entire Mediterranean, the objects of exchange are not only luxury goods, but also everyday goods.
Around 800 BC e. Greek society is a simple, primitive social structure with a predominance of the peasantry, an aristocracy not much different from it, and with an insignificant number of slaves.	Around 500 BC e. Greece has already experienced an era of great social changes, the slave of the classical type is becoming one of the main elements of the social structure, along with the peasantry there are other socio-professional groups; various forms of political organization are known: monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, aristocratic and democratic republic.
In 800 BC. e. There are still practically no churches, theaters, or stadiums in Greece.	In 500 BC. e. Greece is a country with many beautiful public buildings, the ruins of which still amaze us. Emerge and develop lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, natural philosophy.

The decomposition of old traditional relations and the emergence of new ones

The rapid rise prepared by previous development and the spread of iron tools had multiple consequences for society. The increase in labor productivity in agriculture and crafts led to an increase in surplus product. Everything was released from the agricultural sector larger number people, which ensured the rapid growth of the craft. The separation of the agricultural and handicraft sectors of the economy entailed regular exchange between them, the emergence of a market and a universal equivalent - minted coins. A new type of wealth - money - begins to compete with the old - land ownership, disintegrating traditional relationships.

As a result, there is a rapid decomposition of primitive communal relations and the formation of new forms of socio-economic and political organization of society. This process occurs differently in various parts Hellas, but everywhere it entails the maturation of social conflicts between the emerging aristocracy and the ordinary population, primarily communal peasants, and then other strata.

Modern researchers usually date the formation of the Greek aristocracy to the 8th century. BC e. The aristocracy of that time was a limited group of people characterized by a special lifestyle and value system that was obligatory for its members. It occupied a predominant position in the sphere of public life, especially in the administration of justice, and played a leading role in war, since only noble warriors had heavy weapons, and therefore the battles were essentially duels of aristocrats. The aristocracy sought to completely bring ordinary members of society under its control and turn them into an exploited mass. According to modern researchers, the attack of the aristocracy on ordinary citizens began in the 8th century. BC e. Little is known about the details of this process, but its main results can be judged by the example of Athens, where the increased influence of the aristocracy led to the creation of a clearly defined class structure, a gradual reduction in the layer of the free peasantry and an increase in the number of dependents.

"The Great Greek Colonization"

Closely related to this situation is the phenomenon of enormous historical significance as "the great Greek colonization". Since the middle of the 8th century. BC e. Greeks were forced to leave their homeland and move to other countries.

Over three centuries, they created many colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Colonization developed in three main directions:

western (Sicily, Southern Italy, Southern France and even the eastern coast of Spain),
northern (Thracian coast of the Aegean Sea, the area of straits leading from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and its coast),
southeastern (the coast of North Africa and the Levant country).

Modern researchers believe that its main incentive was the lack of land. Greece suffered from both absolute agrarian overpopulation (an increase in population due to general economic growth) and relative (lack of land among the poorest peasants due to the concentration of land ownership in the hands of the nobility). The reasons for colonization also include political struggle, which usually reflected the main social contradiction of the era - the struggle for land, as a result of which those defeated in the civil war were often forced to leave their homeland and move overseas. There were also trade motives: the desire of the Greeks to bring trade routes under their control.

Moschophorus (“calf-carrying”). Acropolis. Athens. Around 570 BC

The pioneers of Greek colonization were the cities of Chalkida and Eretria located on the island of Euboea - in the 8th century. BC, apparently, the most advanced cities in Greece, the most important centers of metallurgical production. Later, Corinth, Megara, and the cities of Asia Minor, especially Miletus, were included in the colonization.

Colonization had a huge impact on the development of ancient Greek society, especially in the economic sphere. The inability to establish the necessary branches of craft in a new place led to the fact that very soon the colonies established the closest economic ties with the old centers of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor. From here, both the colony and the local population neighboring them began to receive products of Greek crafts, especially artistic ones, as well as some types of agricultural products (the best varieties of wine, olive oil, etc.). In return, the colonies supplied grain and other food products, as well as raw materials (timber, metal, etc.) to Greece. As a result, Greek craft received an impetus for further development, and agriculture began to acquire a commercial character. In this way, colonization muted social conflicts in Greece, removing the masses of the landless population from its borders and at the same time contributing to changes in the social and economic structure of Greek society.

Changes in the socio-political situation

The attack of the aristocracy on the rights of the demos reached its apogee in the 7th century. BC, causing counter-resistance. In Greek society, a special social stratum of people appeared who acquired, most often through craft and trade, significant wealth, led an aristocratic lifestyle, but did not have the hereditary privileges of the nobility. “Money is held in high esteem by everyone. Wealth has mixed the breeds,” the poet Theognis of Megara notes bitterly. This new layer greedily strived for control, thereby becoming an ally of the peasants in the fight against the nobility. The first successes in this struggle were most often associated with the establishment of written laws that limited the arbitrariness of the aristocracy.

Resistance to the growing dominance of the nobility was facilitated by at least three circumstances. Around 675-600 BC. Thanks to technological progress, a kind of revolution is taking place in military affairs. Heavy armor becomes available to ordinary citizens, and the aristocracy loses its advantage in the military sphere. Due to the scarcity of the country's natural resources, the Greek aristocracy could not catch up with the aristocracy of the East. Due to the peculiarities of historical development in Iron Age Greece, there were no such economic institutions (similar to the temple farms of the East), based on which the peasantry could be exploited. Even the peasants who were dependent on the aristocrats were not economically connected to the latter’s farms. All this predetermined the fragility of the dominance of the nobility in society. Finally, the force that prevented the aristocrats from strengthening their position was their ethics. It had an “atonal” (competitive) character: every aristocrat, in accordance with the ethical standards inherent in this layer, strived to be the first everywhere - on the battlefield, in sports competitions, in politics. This system of values was created by the nobility earlier and transferred to a new historical period, when it needed the unity of all forces to ensure dominance. However, the aristocracy was unable to achieve this.

The emergence of tyranny

Exacerbation of social conflicts in the 7th-6th centuries. BC. led to the birth of tyranny in many Greek cities, i.e. sole power of the ruler.

At that time, the concept of “tyranny” did not yet have the negative connotation inherent in it today. The tyrants pursued an active foreign policy, created powerful armed forces, decorated and improved their cities. However, the early tyranny as a regime could not last long. The historical doom of tyranny was explained by its internal contradictions. The overthrow of the rule of the nobility and the struggle against it were impossible without the support of the masses. The peasantry, who benefited from this policy, initially supported the tyrants, but when the threat posed by the aristocracy waned, they gradually came to realize the uselessness of the tyrannical regime.

Tyranny was not a stage characteristic of the life of all policies. It was most typical for those cities that, back in the archaic era, became large trade and craft centers. The process of formation of the classical polis due to the relative abundance of sources is best known to us from the example of Athens.

Athens option

The history of Athens in the archaic era is the history of the formation of a democratic polis. The monopoly on political power in the period under review belonged to the nobility here - the eupatrides, who gradually turned ordinary citizens into a dependent mass. This process already in the 7th century. BC. led to outbreaks of social conflicts.

Fundamental changes occur at the beginning of the 6th century. BC, and they are connected with the reforms of Solon. The most important of them was the so-called sisakhfiyah (“shaking off the burden”). As a result of this reform, the peasants, who, due to debts, had essentially turned into shareholders of their own land, restored their status as owners. At the same time, it was forbidden to enslave Athenians for debt. The reforms that undermined the political dominance of the nobility were of great importance. From now on, the scope of political rights depended not on nobility, but on the size of property (all citizens of the policy were divided into four property categories). In accordance with this division, the military organization of Athens was also restructured. A new governing body was created - the council (bule), and the importance of the people's assembly increased.

Solon's reforms, despite their radicality, did not solve all the problems. The aggravation of social struggle in Athens led in 560 BC. to the establishment of the tyranny of Pisistratus and his sons, which lasted here intermittently until 510 BC. Peisistratus pursued an active foreign policy, strengthening the position of Athens on maritime trade routes. Crafts flourished in the city, trade developed, and large-scale construction was carried out. Athens was turning into one of the largest economic centers of Hellas. Under the successors of Pisistratus, this regime fell, which again caused an exacerbation of social contradictions. Soon after 509 BC. e. under the leadership of Cleisthenes, a new series of reforms was carried out, finally establishing the democratic system. The most important of them was the reform of electoral law: from now on all citizens, regardless of their property status, had equal political rights. The system of territorial division was changed, destroying the influence of aristocrats on the ground.

Sparta variant

Sparta offers a different development option. Having captured Lakonica and enslaved the local population, the Dorians already in the 9th century. BC. created a state in Sparta. Born very early as a result of conquest, it retained many primitive features in its structure. Subsequently, the Spartans, during two wars, sought to conquer Messenia, a region in the western Peloponnese. The internal social conflict between the nobility and ordinary citizens, which had already been brewing before, erupted in Sparta during the Second Messenian War. In its main features it resembled the conflicts that existed in other parts of Greece around the same time. The long struggle between ordinary Spartiates and the aristocracy led to the restructuring of Spartan society. A system was created, which in later times was called Lykurgov, after the name of the legislator who allegedly established it. Of course, tradition simplifies the picture, because this system was not created immediately, but developed gradually. Having overcome the internal crisis, Sparta was able to conquer Messenia and became the most powerful state in the Peloponnese and, perhaps, in all of Greece.

All the land in Lakonica and Messenia was divided into equal plots - claires, which each Spartiate received for temporary possession; after his death, the land was returned to the state. Other measures also served the desire for complete equality of the Spartiates:

a harsh education system aimed at creating an ideal warrior;
the strictest regulation of all aspects of the lives of citizens - the Spartiates lived as if they were in a military camp;
prohibition to engage in agriculture, crafts and trade, to use gold and silver;
limiting contacts with the outside world.

The political system was also reformed. Along with the kings, who performed the functions of military leaders, judges and priests, the council of elders (gerusia) and the people's assembly (apella), a new governing body appeared - the college of five ephors (overseers). The Ephorate was the highest control body that ensured that no one deviated one step from the principles of the Spartan system, which became the object of pride of the Spartans, who believed that they had achieved the ideal of equality.

In historiography, there is traditionally a view of Sparta as a militarized, militaristic state, and some authoritative experts even call it a “police” state. There is a reason for this definition. The basis on which the “community of equals” was based, that is, a collective of equal and full-fledged Spartiates who were not at all engaged in productive labor, was the exploited mass of the enslaved population of Laconia and Messenia - the helots. Scientists have been arguing for many years about how to determine the position of this segment of the population. Many tend to consider helots as state slaves. The helots owned plots of land, tools, and had economic independence, but they were obliged to transfer a certain share of the harvest to their masters, the Spartiates, ensuring their existence. According to modern researchers, this share was approximately 1/6-1/4 of the harvest. Deprived of all political rights, the helots belonged entirely to the state, which disposed not only of their property, but also of their lives. The slightest protest on the part of the helots was severely punished.

In the Spartan polis there was another social group - the perieki (“living around”), descendants of the Dorians who were not included in the citizens of Sparta. They lived in communities, had internal self-government under the supervision of Spartan officials, and were engaged in agriculture, crafts and trade. The Perieki were obliged to field military contingents. Similar social conditions and a system close to the Spartan system are known in Crete, Argos, Thessaly and other areas.

Archaic culture

Ethnic identity

Like all other areas of life, Greek culture in the archaic era experienced rapid changes. During these centuries, the development of ethnic identity took place; the Greeks gradually began to recognize themselves as a single people, different from other peoples, whom they began to call barbarians. Ethnic self-awareness was also reflected in some social institutions. According to Greek tradition, starting in 776 BC. The Olympic Games began to be held, to which only Greeks were allowed.

Ethics

In the archaic era, the main features of the ethics of ancient Greek society took shape. Its distinctive feature was the combination of an emerging sense of collectivism and an agonistic (competitive) principle. The formation of the polis as a special type of community, which replaced the loose associations of the “heroic” era, gave rise to a new, polis morality - collectivist at its core, since the existence of an individual outside the framework of the polis was impossible. The development of this morality was also facilitated by the military organization of the polis (phalanx formation). The highest valor of a citizen consisted in the defense of his polis: “It is sweet to lose your life, among the valiant warriors, to a brave man in battle for the sake of his fatherland” - these words of the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus perfectly expressed the mentality of the new era, characterizing the system of values \u200b\u200bthat prevailed then. However, the new morality retained the principles of morality of Homer's time with its leading principle of competition. The nature of the political reforms in the policies determined the preservation of this morality, since it was not the aristocracy that was deprived of its rights, but ordinary citizenship was raised in terms of the scope of political rights to the level of the aristocracy. Because of this, the traditional ethics of the aristocracy spread among the masses, although in a modified form: the most important principle is who will best serve the polis.

Religion

Religion also experienced a certain transformation. The formation of a single Greek world, with all its local features, entailed the creation of a pantheon common to all Greeks. Evidence of this is Hesiod’s poem “Theogony”. The cosmogonic ideas of the Greeks were not fundamentally different from the ideas of many other peoples. It was believed that Chaos, Earth (Gaia), underworld(Tartarus) and Eros - the life principle. Gaia gave birth to the starry sky - Uranus, who became the first ruler of the world and the husband of Gaia. From Uranus and Gaia the second generation of gods was born - the Titans. The Titan Kronos (god of agriculture) overthrew the power of Uranus. In turn, the children of Kronos - Hades, Poseidon, Zeus, Hestia, Demeter and Hera - under the leadership of Zeus overthrew Kronos and seized power over the Universe. Thus, the Olympian gods are the third generation of deities. Zeus became the supreme deity - the ruler of the sky, thunder and lightning. Poseidon was considered the god of moisture that irrigates the earth and seas, Hades (Pluto) was the ruler of the underworld. Zeus's wife Hera was the patroness of marriage, Hestia was the goddess of the hearth. Demeter was revered as the patroness of agriculture, whose daughter Cora, once kidnapped by Hades, became his wife.

From the marriage of Zeus and Hera, Hebe was born - the goddess of youth, Ares - the god of war, Hephaestus, who personified the volcanic fire hidden in the bowels of the earth, and also patronized artisans, especially blacksmiths. Among the descendants of Zeus, Apollo stood out especially - the god of the light principle in nature, often called Phoebus (Shining). According to myths, he defeated the dragon Python, and at the place where he accomplished his feat, and it was in Delphi, the Greeks built a temple in honor of Apollo. This god was considered the patron of the arts, a healing god, but at the same time a deity who brings death, spreading epidemics; he later became a patron of colonization. The role of Apollo increases more and more over time, and he begins to displace Zeus.

Apollo's sister Artemis is the goddess of the hunt and patroness of youth. The many-sided functions of Hermes, initially the god of material wealth, then trade, the patron of deceivers and thieves, and finally the patron of speakers and athletes; Hermes also took the souls of the dead to the underworld. Dionysus (or Bacchus) was revered as the deity of the productive forces of nature, viticulture and winemaking. Athena, born from the head of Zeus, was highly respected - the goddess of wisdom, all rational principles, but also war (unlike Ares, who personified reckless courage). Athena's constant companion is the goddess of victory Nike, the symbol of Athena's wisdom is the owl. Aphrodite, born from sea foam, was worshiped as the goddess of love and beauty.

For Greek religious consciousness, especially at this stage of development, the idea of the omnipotence of a deity is not typical; a faceless force reigned over the world of the Olympian gods - Fate (Ananka). Due to political fragmentation and the lack of a priestly class, the Greeks did not develop a single religion. A large number of very close, but not identical, arose religious systems. As the polis worldview developed, ideas about the special connection of individual deities with one or another polis, whose patrons they acted, took shape. Thus, the goddess Athena is especially closely associated with the city of Athens, Hera with Samos and Argos, Apollo and Artemis with Delos, Apollo with Delphi, Zeus with Olympia, etc.

The Greek worldview is characterized not only by polytheism, but also by the idea of the universal animation of nature. Every natural phenomenon, every river, mountain, grove had its own deity. From the Greek point of view, there was no insurmountable line between the world of people and the world of gods; heroes acted as an intermediary link between them. Heroes such as Hercules joined the world of the gods for their exploits. The gods of the Greeks themselves were anthropomorphic, they experienced human passions and could suffer like people.

Architecture

The role of temples in Greek society

The temple as an institution contributed to the development of various types of art. Early on, the custom of bringing gifts to the temple was established; part of the booty captured from enemies, weapons, offerings on the occasion of deliverance from danger, etc. were donated to him. A significant part of such gifts were works of art. An important role was played by temples that gained panhellenic popularity, especially the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Rivalry first noble families, and then policies contributed to the fact that the best works of art were concentrated here, and the territory of the sanctuary became something like a museum.

Sculpture

Black-figure amphora. 540s BC.

In the archaic era, monumental sculpture arose - a form of art previously unknown to Greece. The earliest sculptures were images crudely carved from wood, often inlaid with ivory and covered with sheets of bronze. Improvements in stone processing techniques not only affected architecture, but also led to the emergence of stone sculpture, and in metal processing techniques - to the casting of bronze sculptures. In the VII-VI centuries. BC. two types dominate in sculpture: a naked male figure and a draped female figure. The birth of the statue type of the male nude figure is associated with the main trends in the development of society. The statue depicts a fine and valiant citizen, a winner in sports competitions, who brought glory to his hometown. Tombstone statues and images of deities began to be made using the same type. The appearance of relief is mainly associated with the custom of erecting tombstones. Later, reliefs in the form of complex multi-figure compositions became an indispensable part of the temple entablature. Statues and reliefs were usually painted.

Vase painting

Greek monumental painting is much less known than vase painting. The example of the latter best illustrates the main trends in the development of art: the emergence of realistic principles, the interaction of local art and influences coming from the East. In the 7th - early 6th centuries. BC. Corinthian and Rhodian vases with colorful paintings of the so-called carpet style predominated. They usually depicted floral patterns and various animals and fantastic creatures arranged in a row. In the VI century. BC. The black-figure style dominates in vase painting: figures painted with black varnish stood out sharply against the reddish background of clay. Paintings on black-figure vases were often multi-figure compositions on mythological subjects: various episodes from the life of the Olympian gods; the labors of Hercules and the Trojan War were popular. Less common were subjects related to the everyday life of people: a battle of hoplites, athletic competitions, scenes of a feast, a round dance of girls, etc.

Since individual images were executed in the form of black silhouettes against a clay background, they give the impression of being flat. Vases made in different cities have their own unique features. The black-figure style reached a special peak in Athens. Attic black-figure vases were distinguished by their graceful forms, high technology production, subject variety. Some vase painters signed their paintings, and thanks to this we know, for example, the name of Clytius, who painted a magnificent wine vessel (crater): the painting consists of several belts on which multi-figure compositions are presented. Another magnificent example of painting is the Exekia kylix. The vase painter occupied the entire round surface of the wine bowl with one scene: the god Dionysus reclines on a ship sailing under a white sail, grape vines curl around the mast, and heavy grapes hang down. Seven dolphins are diving around, into which, according to myth, Dionysus turned the Tyrrhenian pirates.

Alphabetic writing and philosophy

The greatest achievement of Greek culture of the archaic era was the creation of alphabetic writing. By transforming the Phoenician syllabary system, the Greeks created a simple way of recording information. In order to learn to write and count, years of hard work were no longer needed; there was a “democratization” of the education system, which made it possible to gradually make almost all free residents of Greece literate. Thus, knowledge was “secularized,” which became one of the reasons for the absence of the priestly class in Greece and contributed to the increase in the spiritual potential of society as a whole.

In modern scientific literature, there are two main views on the emergence of philosophy.

According to one, the birth of philosophy is a derivative of the development of science; the quantitative accumulation of positive knowledge resulted in a qualitative leap.
According to another explanation, early Greek philosophy was practically no different, except for the method of expression, from the stage-wise earlier mythological system of knowledge of the world.
However, in recent years, a view has been expressed that seems to be the most correct: philosophy was born from the social experience of a citizen of the early polis.

The polis and the relations of citizens in it are the model by analogy with which Greek philosophers saw the world. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the emergence of philosophy in its earliest form - natural philosophy (that is, philosophy addressed primarily to the knowledge of the most general laws of the world) - occurs in the most advanced policies of Asia Minor. It is with them that the activities of the first philosophers are connected - Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes. Natural philosophical teachings about the primary elements made it possible to build big picture world and explain it without resorting to the help of the gods. The emerging philosophy was spontaneously materialistic, the main thing in the work of its first representatives was the search for the material fundamental principles of all things.

The founder of Ionian natural philosophy, Thales, considered water, which is in continuous movement, to be such a fundamental principle. Its transformations created and create all things, which in turn turn back into water. Thales imagined the earth as a flat disk floating on the surface of primordial water. Thales was also considered the founder of mathematics, astronomy and a number of other specific sciences. By comparing records of successive solar eclipses, he predicted an eclipse of the sun in 597 (or 585) BC. and explained it by the fact that the Moon obscured the Sun. According to Anaximander, the fundamental principle of everything is apeiron, indefinite, eternal and limitless matter, in constant motion. Anaximander gave the first formulation of the law of conservation of energy and created the first geometric model of the Universe.

The materialism and dialectics of the Ionian natural philosophers were opposed by the Pythagoreans - followers of the teachings of Pythagoras, who created a religious and mystical community in Southern Italy. The Pythagoreans considered mathematics to be the basis, believing that it was not quality, but quantity, not substance, but form that determined the essence of everything. Gradually they began to identify things with numbers, depriving them of material content. The abstract number, transformed into an absolute, was thought of by them as the basis of the immaterial essence of the world.

Literature

At the beginning of the archaic era, the dominant genre of literature was the epic, inherited from the previous era. The recording of Homer's poems, carried out in Athens under Pisistratus, marked the end of the “epic” period. The epic, as a reflection of the experience of the entire society in the new conditions, had to give way to other types of literature. In this era, filled with turbulent social conflicts, lyrical genres are developing that reflect the experiences of the individual. Citizenship distinguishes the poetry of Tyrtaeus, who inspired the Spartans in their struggle for the possession of Messenia. In his elegies, Tyrtaeus praised military virtues and set out standards of behavior for warriors. And in later times they were sung during campaigns; they were also popular outside of Sparta as a hymn to the patriotism of the city. The work of Theognis, an aristocratic poet who realized the death of the aristocratic system and suffered from it, is permeated with hatred of the lower classes and a thirst for revenge:

Firmly trample the empty-hearted people with your heel, mercilessly
If you stab me with a sharp stick, crush me with a heavy yoke!

One of the first lyric poets, Archilochus, lived a life full of hardships and suffering. The son of an aristocrat and a slave, Archilochus, driven by poverty, went from his native Paros with the colonists to Thasos, fought with the Thracians, served as a mercenary, visited “beautiful and happy” Italy, but found happiness nowhere:

My bread is kneaded in a sharp spear. And in the spear -
Wine from Ismar. I drink, leaning on a spear.

The work of another great lyricist, Alcaeus, reflected the turbulent political life of that time. Along with political motives, his poems also contain table songs, they contain the joy of life and the sadness of love, reflections on the inevitability of death and calls for friends to enjoy life:

The rains are raging. Great cold
Carries from the sky. The rivers are all bound...
Let's drive away winter. Blazing bright
Let's light the fire. Give me sweets generously
Pour some wine. Then under the cheek
Give me a soft pillow.

“Sappho is violet-haired, pure, with a gentle smile!” - the poet addresses his great contemporary Sappho.

At the center of Sappho's work was a woman suffering from love and tormented by the pangs of jealousy, or a mother tenderly loving her children. Sappho’s poetry is dominated by sad motifs, which gives it a peculiar charm:

Fortunately, it seems to me equal to God
The man who is so close
Sitting in front of you, your sounding tender
Listens to the voice
And a lovely laugh. I have at the same time
My heart would immediately stop beating.

Anacreon called his work poetry of beauty, love and fun. He did not think about politics, wars, civil strife:

My dear is not the one who, while feasting, speaks at his full cup
It only talks about litigation and a regrettable war;
Dear to me, who, Muses and Cypris, combining good gifts,
He makes it his rule to be more cheerful at the feast.

Anacreon's poems, marked by undeniable talent and enchanting in their form, had a huge influence on European, including Russian, poetry.

Towards the end of the archaic era is the birth literary prose, represented by the works of logographers who collected local legends, genealogies of noble families, and stories about the founding of policies. At the same time, theatrical art appeared, the roots of which lie in the folk rituals of agricultural cults.

The archaic period in the history of Greece is usually called the 8th – 6th centuries. BC e. According to some researchers, this is the time of the most intensive development of ancient society. Indeed, over the course of three centuries, many important discoveries were made that determined the nature of the technical basis of ancient society, and those socio-economic and political phenomena developed that gave ancient society a certain specificity in comparison with other slave-holding societies: classical slavery; monetary circulation and market system; the main form of political organization is the polis; the concept of popular sovereignty and democratic form of government. At the same time, the main ethical norms and principles of morality, aesthetic ideals were developed that influenced the ancient world throughout its history until the emergence of Christianity. Finally, during this period the main phenomena of ancient culture arose: philosophy and science, the main genres of literature, theater, order architecture, and sports.

In order to more clearly imagine the dynamics of the development of society in the archaic period, we present the following comparison. Around 800 BC e. The Greeks lived in a limited territory of the south of the Balkan Peninsula, the islands of the Aegean Sea and the western coast of Asia Minor. Around 500 BC e. they already occupy the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to the Levant and from Africa to the Crimea. Around 800 BC e. Greece is essentially a village world, a world of self-sufficient small communities, by 500 BC. e. Greece is already a mass of small towns with local markets, monetary relations powerfully invade the economy, trade relations cover the entire Mediterranean, the objects of exchange are not only luxury goods, but also everyday goods. Around 800 BC e. Greek society is a simple, primitive social structure with a predominance of the peasantry, an aristocracy not much different from it, and with an insignificant number of slaves. Around 500 BC e. Greece has already experienced an era of great social changes, the slave of the classical type is becoming one of the main elements of the social structure, along with the peasantry there are other socio-professional groups; Various forms of political organization are known: monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, aristocratic and democratic republics. In 800 BC. e. There are still practically no churches, theaters, or stadiums in Greece. In 500 BC. e. Greece is a country with many beautiful public buildings, the ruins of which still amaze us. Lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, and natural philosophy emerge and develop.

The rapid rise prepared by previous development and the spread of iron tools had multiple consequences for society. The increase in labor productivity in agriculture and crafts led to an increase in surplus product. An increasing number of people were released from the agricultural sector, which ensured the rapid growth of crafts. The separation of the agricultural and handicraft sectors of the economy led to regular exchange between them, the emergence of a market and a universal equivalent - minted coins. A new type of wealth - money - begins to compete with the old one - land ownership, disintegrating traditional relations.

As a result, there is a rapid decomposition of primitive communal relations and the formation of new forms of socio-economic and political organization of society. This process proceeds differently in different parts of Hellas, but everywhere it entails the maturation of social conflicts between the emerging aristocracy and the ordinary population, first of all, communal peasants, and then other strata.

Modern researchers usually date the formation of the Greek aristocracy to the 8th century. BC e. The aristocracy of that time was a limited group of people characterized by a special way of life and value system that was obligatory for its members. It occupied a predominant position in the sphere of public life, especially in the administration of justice, and played a leading role in war, since only noble warriors had heavy weapons, and therefore the battles were essentially duels of aristocrats. The aristocracy sought to completely bring ordinary members of society under its control, to turn them into an exploited mass. According to modern researchers, the attack of the aristocracy on ordinary fellow citizens began in the 8th century BC. e. Little is known about the details of this process, but its main results can be judged by the example of Athens, where the increased influence of the aristocracy led to the creation of a clearly defined class structure, a gradual reduction in the layer of the free peasantry and an increase in the number of dependents.

Closely related to this situation is such a phenomenon of enormous historical significance as the “great Greek colonization.” Since the middle of the 8th century BC. e. Greeks were forced to leave their homeland and move to other countries.

Over three centuries, they created many colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Colonization developed in three main directions: western (Sicily, southern Italy, southern France and then the eastern coast of Spain), northern (the Thracian coast of the Aegean Sea, the area of straits leading from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and its coast) and southeastern (the coast of North Africa and the Levant country).

Modern researchers believe that its main stimulus was the lack of land. Greece suffered from both absolute agrarian overpopulation (increase in population due to general economic growth) and relative (lack of land among the poorest peasants due to the concentration of land ownership in the hands of the nobility). Among the causes of colonization also include political struggle, which usually reflected the main social contradiction of the era - the struggle for land, as a result of which those defeated in the civil war were often forced to leave their homeland and move overseas. There were also trade motives - the desire of the Greeks to bring trade routes under their control.

The pioneers of Greek colonization were the cities of Chalkida and Eretria located on the island of Euboea - in the 8th century BC. e., apparently, the most advanced cities of Greece, the most important centers of metallurgical production. Later, Corinth, Megara, and cities of Asia Minor, especially Miletus, were included in the colonization.

Colonization had a huge impact on the development of ancient Greek society, especially in the economic sphere. The inability to establish the necessary branches of craft in a new place led to the fact that very soon the colonies established the closest economic ties with the old centers of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor From here to the colonies and to the local population neighboring them began to receive products of Greek crafts, especially artistic ones, as well as some types of agricultural products (the best varieties of wines, olive oil, etc.). In return, the colonies supplied grain and other food products, as well as raw materials (timber, metal, etc.) to Greece. As a result, Greek crafts received an impetus for further development, and agriculture began to acquire a commercial character. Thus, colonization muffled social conflicts in Greece , bringing out of its borders the mass of the landless population and at the same time contributing to a change in the social and economic structure of Greek society.

The attack of the aristocracy on the rights of the demos reached its apogee in the 7th century BC. e., causing counter-resistance. In Greek society, a special social stratum of people appeared who acquired, most often through craft and trade, significant wealth, led an aristocratic lifestyle, but did not have the hereditary privileges of the nobility “Money is held in universal esteem. Wealth has mixed the breeds,” - The poet Theognis of Megara notes bitterly. This new layer greedily strived for control, thereby becoming an ally of the Peasants in the fight against the nobility. The first successes in this fight were most often associated with the establishment of written laws that limited the arbitrariness of the aristocracy.

Resistance to the growing dominance of the nobility was facilitated by at least three circumstances. Around 675 - 600. BC e. thanks to technological progress, a kind of revolution in military affairs occurs. Heavy armor becomes available to ordinary citizens, and the aristocracy loses its advantage in the military sphere. Due to the scarcity of the country's natural resources, the Greek aristocracy could not catch up with the aristocracy of the East. Due to the peculiarities of historical development in Iron Age Greece, it was not There were such economic institutions (similar to the temple farms of the East), based on which the peasantry could be exploited. Even the peasants who were dependent on the aristocrats were not economically connected with the latter’s farms. All this predetermined the fragility of the dominance of the nobility in society. Finally, the force that prevented the strengthening of the positions of the aristocrats was their ethics. It had an “agonal” (competitive) character: each aristocrat, in accordance with the ethical standards inherent in this stratum, strived to be the first everywhere - on the battlefield, in sports competitions, in politics. This system of values was created by the nobility earlier and transferred to a new historical period, when it needed the unity of all forces to ensure dominance. However, the aristocracy was unable to achieve this.

Exacerbation of social conflicts in the 7th – 6th centuries. BC e. led to the birth of tyranny in many Greek cities, that is, the sole power of the ruler.

Fundamental changes occur at the beginning of the 6th century. BC uh, and they are connected with Solon’s reforms. The most important of them was the so-called sisakhfia (“shaking off the burden”). As a result of this reform, the peasants, who, due to debts, had essentially become sharecroppers of their own land, restored their status as owners. At the same time, it was forbidden to enslave Athenians for debts. The reforms that undermined the political dominance of the nobility were of great importance. From now on, the scope of political rights depended not on nobility, but on the size of property (all citizens of the policy were divided into four property categories). In accordance with this division, the military organization of Athens was also restructured. A new governing body was created - the council (bule), and the importance of the people's assembly increased.

Solon's reforms, despite their radicality, did not solve all the problems. The aggravation of social struggle in Athens led in 560 BC. e. to the establishment of the tyranny of Pisistratus and his sons, which lasted here intermittently until 510 BC. e. Peisistratus pursued an active foreign policy, strengthening the position of Athens on maritime trade routes. Crafts flourished in the city, trade developed, and large-scale construction was carried out. Athens was turning into one of the largest economic centers of Hellas. Under the successors of Pisistratus, this regime fell, which again caused an exacerbation of social contradictions. Soon after 509 BC. e. under the leadership of Cleisthenes, a new series of reforms was carried out, finally establishing the democratic system. The most important of them was the reform of electoral law: from now on, all citizens, regardless of their property status, had equal political rights. The system of territorial division was changed, which destroyed the influence of aristocrats in the localities.

Sparta offers a different development option. Having captured Lakonica and enslaved the local population, the Dorians already in the 9th century. BC e. created a state in Sparta. Born very early as a result of conquest, it retained many primitive features in its structure. Subsequently, the Spartans, during two wars, sought to conquer Messenia, a region in the western Peloponnese. The internal social conflict between the nobility and ordinary citizens, which had already been brewing before, erupted in Sparta during the Second Messenian War. In its main features it resembled the conflicts that existed in other parts of Greece around the same time. The long struggle between ordinary Spartiates and the aristocracy led to the restructuring of Spartan society. A system was created, which in later times was called Lykurgov, after the name of the legislator who allegedly established it. Of course, tradition simplifies the picture, because this system was not created immediately, but developed gradually. Having overcome the internal crisis, Sparta was able to conquer Messenia and became the most powerful state in the Peloponnese and, perhaps, in all of Greece.

All the land in Laconia and Messenia was divided into equal plots - claires, which each Spartiate received for temporary possession; after his death, the land was returned to the state. Other measures also served the desire for complete equality of the Spartiates: a harsh education system aimed at forming an ideal warrior, the strictest regulation of all aspects of the lives of citizens - the Spartiates lived as if they were in a military camp, a ban on farming, crafts and trade, and the use of gold and silver; limiting contacts with the outside world. The political system was also reformed. Along with the kings, who performed the functions of military leaders, judges and priests, the council of elders (gerusia) and the people's assembly (apella), a new governing body appeared - the college of five ephors (overseers). The ephorate was the highest control body, ensuring that no one deviated a single step from the principles of the Spartan system, which became the object of pride of the Spartans, who believed that they had achieved the ideal of equality.

In historiography, there is traditionally a view of Sparta as a militarized, militaristic state, and some authoritative experts even call it a “police” state. There is a reason for this definition. The basis on which the “community of equals” was based, i.e. a collective of equal and full-fledged Spartiates, completely unoccupied with productive labor, was the exploited mass of the enslaved population of Laconia and Messenia - the helots. Scientists have been arguing for many years about how to determine the position of this segment of the population. Many tend to consider helots as state slaves. The helots owned plots of land, tools, and had economic independence, but they were obliged to transfer a certain share of the harvest to their masters, the Spartiates, ensuring their existence. According to modern researchers, this share was approximately 1/6-1/7 of the harvest. Deprived of all political rights, the helots belonged entirely to the state, which disposed not only of their property, but also of their lives. The slightest protest on the part of the helots was severely punished.

Like all other areas of life, Greek culture in the archaic era experienced rapid changes. During these centuries, the development of ethnic identity took place; the Greeks gradually began to recognize themselves as a single people, different from other peoples, whom they began to call barbarians. Ethnic self-awareness was also reflected in some social institutions. According to Greek tradition, starting from 776 BC. e. The Olympic Games began to be held, to which only Greeks were allowed.

In the archaic era, the main features of the ethics of ancient Greek society took shape. Its distinctive feature was the combination of the emerging sense of collectivism and the agonistic (competitive) principle. The formation of the polis as a special type of community, replacing the loose associations of the “heroic” era, gave rise to a new, polis morality - collectivist at its core, since the existence of the individual is outside the framework policy was impossible. The development of this morality was also facilitated by the military organization of the polis (phalanx formation). The highest valor of a citizen consisted in the defense of his polis: “It is sweet to lose life, among the valiant warriors who fell, a brave man in battle is glad of his homeland” - these words of the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus expressed it perfectly mentality of the new era, characterizing the system of values prevailing then. However, the new morality retained the principles of morality of Homer's time with its leading principle of competition. The nature of the political reforms in the policies determined the preservation of this morality, since it was not the aristocracy that was deprived of its rights, but ordinary citizenship was raised in terms of the scope of political rights to the level of the aristocracy. Because of this, the traditional ethics of the aristocracy spread among the masses, although in a modified form: the most important principle is who will best serve the polis.

The Archaic era is the time of the formation of architecture. The primacy of public, primarily sacred, architecture is indisputable. The dwellings of that time were simple and primitive, all the forces of society were directed towards monumental buildings, primarily temples. Among them, the temples of the gods - the patrons of the community - took precedence. The emerging sense of unity of the civil collective was expressed in the creation of such temples, which were considered the habitat of the gods. Early temples repeated the structure of the megaron of the 2nd millennium BC. e. A new type of temple was born in Sparta, the oldest city in Hellas. A characteristic feature of Greek architecture is the use of orders, i.e. a special construction system that emphasizes the architectonics of the building, gives expressiveness to the load-bearing and non-supporting elements of the structure, revealing their function. An order building usually has a stepped base; a number of load-bearing vertical supports were placed on it - columns that supported the supporting parts - an entablature that reflected the structure of the beam floor and roof. Initially, temples were built on acropolises - fortified hills, ancient centers of settlements. Later, due to the general democratization of society, changes occurred in the location of temples. They are now erected in the lower city, most often on the agora - the main square, which was the center of social and business life of the polis. The temple as an institution contributed to the development of various types of art. Early on, the custom of bringing gifts to the temple was established; part of the booty captured from enemies, weapons, offerings on the occasion of deliverance from danger, etc. were donated to him. A significant portion of these gifts were works of art. An important role was played by temples that gained panhellenic popularity, especially the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The rivalry of first noble families, and then policies, contributed to the fact that the best works of art were concentrated here, and the territory of the sanctuary became something like a museum.

In the archaic era, monumental sculpture arose - a form of art previously unknown to Greece. The earliest sculptures were images crudely carved from wood, often inlaid with ivory and covered with sheets of bronze. Improvements in stone processing techniques not only affected architecture, but also led to the emergence of stone sculpture, and in metal processing techniques - to the casting of bronze sculptures. In the 7th – 6th centuries. BC e. two types dominate in sculpture: a naked male figure and a draped female figure. The birth of the statue type of the male nude figure is associated with the main trends in the development of society. The statue depicts a fine and valiant citizen, a winner in sports competitions, who brought glory to his hometown. Tombstone statues and images of deities began to be made using the same type. The appearance of relief is mainly associated with the custom of erecting tombstones. Later, reliefs in the form of complex multi-figure compositions became an indispensable part of the temple entablature. Statues and reliefs were usually painted.

Greek monumental painting is much less known than vase painting. The example of the latter best illustrates the main trends in the development of art: the emergence of realistic principles, the interaction of local art and influences coming from the East. In the 7th - early 6th centuries. BC e. Corinthian and Rhodian vases with colorful paintings of the so-called carpet style predominated. They usually depicted floral patterns and various animals and fantastic creatures arranged in a row. In the VI century. BC e. The black-figure style dominates in vase painting: figures painted with black varnish stood out sharply against the reddish background of clay. Paintings on black-figure vases were often multi-figure compositions on mythological subjects: various episodes from the life of the Olympian gods; the labors of Hercules and the Trojan War were popular. Less common were subjects related to the everyday life of people: a battle of hoplites, athletic competitions, scenes of a feast, a round dance of girls, etc.

Since individual images were executed in the form of black silhouettes against a clay background, they give the impression of being flat. Vases made in different cities have their own unique features. The black-figure style reached a special peak in Athens. Attic black-figure vases were distinguished by their graceful forms, high manufacturing techniques, and variety of subjects. Some vase painters signed their paintings, and thanks to this we know, for example, the name of Clytius, who painted a magnificent wine vessel (crater): the painting consists of several belts on which multi-figure compositions are presented. Another magnificent example of painting is the Exekia kylix. The vase painter occupied the entire round surface of the wine bowl with one scene: the god Dionysus reclines on a ship sailing under a white sail, grape vines curl around the mast, and heavy grapes hang down. Seven dolphins are diving around, into which, according to myth, Dionysus turned the Tyrrhenian pirates.

The archaic era is associated with a phenomenon of exceptional importance for European culture - the emergence of philosophy. Philosophy is a fundamentally new approach to understanding the world, sharply different from the one that prevailed in the Near East and Greece of an earlier period. The transition from religious and mythological ideas about the world to its philosophical understanding meant a qualitative leap in the intellectual development of mankind. Setting and formulating problems, relying on the human mind as a means of knowledge, focusing on searching for the causes of everything that happens in the world itself, and not outside it - this is what significantly distinguishes the philosophical approach to the world from religious and mythological views. In modern scientific literature, there are two main views on the emergence of philosophy. According to one, the birth of philosophy is a derivative of the development of science; the quantitative accumulation of positive knowledge resulted in a qualitative leap. According to another explanation, early Greek philosophy was practically no different, except for the method of expression, from the stage-wise earlier mythological system of knowledge of the world. However, in recent years, a view has been expressed that seems to be the most correct: philosophy was born from the social experience of a citizen of the early polis. The polis and the relations of citizens in it are the model by analogy with which Greek philosophers saw the world. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the emergence of philosophy in its earliest form - natural philosophy (i.e., philosophy addressed primarily to the knowledge of the most general laws of the world) - occurs in the most advanced policies of Asia Minor. It is with them that the activities of the first philosophers are connected - Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes. Natural philosophical teachings about the primary elements made it possible to build a general picture of the world and explain it without resorting to the help of the gods. The emerging philosophy was spontaneously materialistic, the main thing in the work of its first representatives was the search for the material fundamental principles of all things.

The founder of Ionian natural philosophy, Thales, considered water, which is in continuous movement, to be such a fundamental principle. Its transformations created and create all things, which in turn turn back into water. Thales imagined the earth as a flat disk floating on the surface of primordial water. Thales was also considered the founder of mathematics, astronomy and a number of other specific sciences. Comparing records of successive solar eclipses, he predicted an eclipse of the sun in 597 (or 585) BC. e. and explained it by the fact that the Moon obscured the Sun. According to Anaximander, the fundamental principle of everything is apeiron, indefinite, eternal and limitless matter, in constant motion. Anaximander gave the first formulation of the law of conservation of energy and created the first geometric model of the Universe.

Firmly trample the empty-hearted people with your heel, mercilessly
If you stab me with a sharp stick, crush me with a heavy yoke!

My bread is kneaded in a sharp spear.
And in the spear is wine from under Ismar. I drink, leaning on a spear.

“Sappho is violet-haired, pure, with a gentle smile!” - the poet addresses his great contemporary Sappho.

Anacreon called his work poetry of beauty, love and fun. He did not think about politics, wars, civil strife:

My dear is not the one who, while feasting, speaks at his full cup
It only talks about litigation and a regrettable war,
Dear to me, who, Muses and Cypris, combining good gifts,
He makes it his rule to be more cheerful at the feast.

Anacreon's poems, marked by undeniable talent and enchanting in their form, had a huge influence on European, including Russian, poetry.

The end of the archaic era marks the birth of artistic prose, represented by the works of logographers who collected local legends, genealogies of noble families, and stories about the founding of policies. At the same time, theatrical art appeared, the roots of which lie in the folk rituals of agricultural cults.

The so-called archaic period, covering the VIII-VI centuries. BC e., is the beginning of a new important stage in the history of ancient Greece. Over these three centuries, t.s. in a relatively short historical period, Greece has far surpassed in its development neighboring countries, including the countries of the ancient East, which until that time were at the forefront of the cultural progress of mankind.

The Archaic period was a time of awakening of the spiritual forces of the Greek people after almost four centuries of stagnation. This is evidenced by an unprecedented explosion of creative activity.

Once again, after a long break, seemingly forever forgotten forms of art are being revived: architecture, monumental sculpture, painting. The colonnades of the first were erected from marble and limestone Greek temples. Statues are carved from stone and cast in bronze. The poems of Homer and Hesiod, the lyrical poems of Archilochus and Saffo, amazing in their depth and sincerity of feeling, appear. Alcaeus and many other poets. The first philosophers - Thales. Anaximenes. Anaximander - intensely pondering the question of the origin of the universe and the fundamental principle of all things.

The rapid growth of Greek culture during the 8th - 6th centuries. BC e. was directly connected with the Great Colonization taking place at that time. Earlier (see "Early Antiquity", lecture 17) it was shown that colonization brought the Greek world out of the state of isolation in which it found itself after the collapse of the Mycenaean culture. The Greeks were able to learn a lot from their neighbors, especially from the peoples of the East. Thus, an alphabetic letter was borrowed from the Phoenicians, which the Greeks improved by introducing the designation of not only consonants, but also vowels; Modern alphabets, including Russian, also originate from here. From Phenicia or Syria, the secret of making glass from sand came to Greece, as well as the method of extracting purple dye from the shells of sea mollusks. The Egyptians and Babylonians became teachers of the Greeks in astronomy and geometry. Egyptian architecture and monumental sculpture had a strong influence on the emerging Greek art. From the Lydians, the Greeks adopted such an important invention as money coinage.

All these elements of foreign cultures were creatively processed, adapted to the urgent needs of life and entered Greek culture as organic components.

Colonization made Greek society more mobile, more receptive. It opened up wide scope for the personal initiative and creative abilities of each person, which contributed to the liberation of the individual from the control of the clan and accelerated the transition of the entire society to a higher level of economic and cultural development. In the life of Greek city-states, navigation and maritime trade now come to the fore. Initially, many of the colonies located on the distant periphery of the Hellenic world found themselves economically dependent on their mother countries.

The colonists were in dire need of the basic necessities. They lacked products such as wine and olive oil, without which the Greeks could not imagine normal human life. Both had to be delivered from Greece by ship. Pottery and other household utensils were also exported from the metropolis to the colonies, then fabrics, weapons, jewelry, etc. These things attract the attention of local residents, and they offer grain and livestock, metals and slaves in exchange for them. The simple products of Greek artisans initially could not, of course, compete with the high-quality oriental goods that Phoenician merchants transported throughout the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, they were in great demand in the markets of the Black Sea region, Thrace, and the Adriatic, remote from the main sea routes, where Phoenician ships appeared relatively rarely. Subsequently, cheaper, but also more mass-produced products of Greek crafts began to penetrate into the “reserved zone” of Phoenician trade - Sicily.

Southern and Central Italy, even Syria and Egypt - and gradually conquers these countries. Colonies little by little turned into important centers of intermediary trade between the countries of the ancient world. In Greece itself, the main centers of economic activity are the policies that are at the head of the colonization movement. Among them are the cities of the islands of Euboea, Corinth and Megara in the Northern Peloponnese, Aegina, Samos and Rhodes in the Aegean archipelago, Miletus and Ephesus on the western coast of Asia Minor.

The opening of markets on the colonial periphery gave a powerful impetus to the improvement of handicraft and agricultural production in Greece itself. Greek artisans are persistently improving technical equipment their workshops. In the entire subsequent history of the ancient world, never again have so many discoveries and inventions been made as during the three centuries that made up the archaic period. It is enough to point out such important innovations as the discovery of a method for soldering iron or bronze casting. Greek vases of the 7th - 6th centuries. BC e. They amaze with their richness and variety of forms and the beauty of their picturesque design. Among them are vessels made by Corinthian masters, painted in the so-called orientalizing, i.e., “oriental” style (it is distinguished by the colorfulness and fantastic whimsicality of the pictorial decoration, reminiscent of drawings on oriental carpets), and later vases of the black-figure style, mainly Athenian and Peloponnesian production. The products of Greek ceramicists and bronze casters testify to high professionalism and a far advanced division of labor not only between industries, but also within individual branches of handicraft production. The bulk of ceramics exported from Greece to foreign markets was produced in special workshops by qualified potters and vase painters. Specialist craftsmen were no longer, as they once were, powerless loners who stood outside the community and its laws and often did not even have a permanent place of residence. Now they form a very numerous and quite influential social stratum. This is indicated not only by the quantitative and qualitative growth of handicraft products, but also by the emergence in the most economically developed policies of special craft districts, where artisans of one specific profession settled. So, in Corinth, starting from the 7th century. BC e. there was a quarter of potters - Keramik. In Athens, a similar quarter, which occupied a significant part of the old city, arose in the 6th century. BC e. All these facts indicate that during the archaic period in Greece a historical shift of enormous importance occurred: crafts were finally separated from agriculture as a special, completely independent branch of commodity production. Agriculture is also being restructured accordingly, which can now focus not only on the internal needs of the family community, but also on market demand. Communication with the market becomes of paramount importance. Many Greek peasants in those days had boats or even entire ships, on which they delivered the products of their farms to the markets of nearby cities (overland roads in mountainous Greece were extremely inconvenient and unsafe due to robbers). In a number of areas of Greece, peasants are switching from growing cereal crops that did not work well here to more profitable perennial crops - grapes and oilseeds: excellent Greek wines and olive oil were in great demand in foreign markets in the colonies. In the end, many Greek states abandoned the production of their own bread altogether and began to live off cheaper imported grain.

So, the main result of the Great Colonization was the transition of Greek society from the stage of a primitive natural economy to a higher stage of a commodity-money economy, which required a universal equivalent of commodity transactions. In the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and then in the most significant policies of European Greece, their own coin standards appeared, imitating the Lydian one. Even before this, in many areas of Greece, small metal (sometimes copper, sometimes iron) bars called obols (lit., “spokes,” “skewers”) were used as the main unit of exchange. Six obols made up a drachma (lit., “handful”), since that many of them could be grabbed with one hand. Now these ancient names were transferred to new monetary units, which also became known as obols and drachmas. Already in the 7th century. In Greece, two main monetary standards were in use - Aeginian and Euboean. In addition to the island of Euboea, the Euboean standard was also adopted in Corinth, Athens (from the beginning of the 6th century) and in many Western Greek colonies; in other places the Aeginetan standard was used. Both systems of monetary coinage were based on a weight unit called talent (Tal ant as a weight unit was borrowed from Western Asia; the Babylonian talent (biltu, about 30 kg) of 60 mina, or 360 shekels, and the Phoenician talent (kikkar) were common here , about 26 kg, which is equal to the Euboean talent) from 60 mina, or 360 shekels. The Aegypian talent weighed 37 kg - Ed.), which in both cases was divided into 6000 drachmas (drachmas were usually minted from silver, obol - from copper or bronze). “Money makes a man” - this saying, attributed to a certain Spartan Aristodemus, has become a kind of motto of the new era. Money many times accelerated the process of property stratification of the community, which began even before its appearance, and brought even closer the complete and final triumph of private property.

Purchase and sale transactions now apply to all types of material assets. Not only movable property: livestock, clothing, utensils, etc., but also lands, which until now were considered the property not of individuals, but of the clan or the entire community, freely pass from hand to hand: sold, mortgaged, transferred by will or as a dowry. The already mentioned Hesiod advises his reader to achieve the favor of the gods with regular sacrifices, “so that,” he ends his instructions, “you buy the plots of others, and not yours, others.”

Money itself is bought and sold. A rich person could lend them to a poor person at an interest rate that, according to our standards, was very high (18% per annum in those days was not considered too high a norm) (As we saw above, in ancient Western Asia of the previous period the percentage was much higher. A decrease in interest rate is an indicator increasing the marketability of farms and, consequently, some reducing their dependence on usurious credit, the dominance of which in Greece turned out to be short-lived - Ed.). Along with usury came debt slavery. Self-mortgage transactions are becoming commonplace. Unable to pay his creditor on time, the debtor pledges his children, his wife, and then himself. If the debt and the accumulated interest on it were not paid even after that, the debtor with his entire family and the rest of his property fell into bondage to the usurer and turned into a slave, whose position was no different from the position of slaves taken captive or bought on the market. Debt slavery contained a terrible danger for the young and not yet strong Greek states. It depleted the internal strength of the city community and undermined its combat effectiveness in the fight against external enemies. Many states adopted special laws that prohibited or limited the enslavement of citizens. An example is the famous Solonian seisakhteia (“shaking off the burden”) in Athens (see about it below). However, purely legislative measures would hardly have been able to eradicate this terrible social evil if a replacement for fellow slaves had not been found in the person of foreign slaves. The widespread spread of this new and, for that time, certainly more progressive form of slavery was directly related to colonization. At that time the Greeks had not yet led big wars with neighboring peoples. The bulk of slaves came to Greek markets from the colonies, where they could be purchased in large quantities and at affordable prices from local kings. Slaves constituted one of the main articles of Scythian and Thracian export to Greece; they were exported en masse from Asia Minor, Italy, Sicily and other areas of the colonial periphery.

The abundance of cheap labor in the markets of Greek cities made possible for the first time the widespread use of slave labor in all major branches of production. Purchased slaves now appear not only in the houses of the nobility, but also in the farms of wealthy peasants.

Slaves could be seen in craft workshops and merchant shops, in markets, in the port, in the construction of fortifications and temples, and in mining. Everywhere they performed the most difficult and humiliating work, which did not require special training. Thanks to this, their owners - citizens of the polis - created an excess of free time, which they could devote to politics, sports, art, philosophy, etc. This is how the foundations of a new slave society were laid in Greece and at the same time a new polis civilization, sharply different from the previous one her palace civilization of the Cretan-Mycenaean era. The first and most important sign indicating the transition of Greek society from barbarism to civilization was the formation of cities. It was during the archaic era that the city first truly separated from the village and politically, as well as economically, subjugated it. This event was associated with the separation of crafts from agriculture and the development of trade relations (However, the Greeks themselves saw the main feature of the city not with trade and craft activities, but in the political independence of the settlement, its independence from other communities. In their understanding, cities (policies ) could also be considered unfortified villages that had independence for reasons of a military-political nature.).

Almost all Greek cities, with the exception of the colonies, grew out of fortified settlements of the Homeric era - poleis, retaining this ancient name. There was, however, one very significant difference between the Homeric polis and the archaic polis that replaced it. Homer's polis was at the same time both a city and a village, since no other settlements competing with it existed in the territory under his control. The archaic polis, on the contrary, was the capital of a dwarf state, which, in addition to itself, also included villages (comas in Greek), located on the outskirts of the territory of the polis and politically dependent on it.

It should also be taken into account that in comparison with Homeric times, the Greek city-states of the Archaic period became larger. This consolidation occurred both due to natural population growth and due to the artificial merger of several village-type settlements into one new city. To this measure, called synoicism in Greek, i.e. “joint settlement” was resorted to by many communities in order to strengthen their defenses in the face of hostile neighbors. In big cities modern understanding this word did not yet exist in Greece. Polis with a population of several thousand people were an exception: in most cities the number of inhabitants apparently did not exceed a thousand people. An example of an archaic polis is ancient Smyrna, excavated by archaeologists; part of it was located on a peninsula that closed the entrance to a deep bay - a convenient ship anchorage. The city center was surrounded by a defensive wall made of bricks on a stone dock. There were several gates with towers and observation platforms in the wall. The city had a regular layout: rows of houses ran strictly parallel to each other. There were several temples in the city. The houses were quite roomy and comfortable; some of them even had terracotta baths.

The main vital center of the early Greek city was the so-called agora, which served as a place for public meetings of citizens and at the same time was used as a market square. The free Greek spent most of his time here. Here he sold and bought, and here, in the community of other citizens of the policy, he was involved in politics - he decided on state affairs; here, in the agora, he could find out all the important city news. Initially, the agora was simply an open square, devoid of any buildings. Later, they began to install wooden or stone seats, rising above each other in steps. People sat on these benches during meetings. At an even later time (already at the end of the archaic period), special canopies - porticos - were erected on the sides of the square, protecting people from the rays of the sun. The porticos turned into a favorite refuge of petty traders, philosophers and all sorts of loitering public. Right on the agora or not far from it, the government buildings of the policy were located: bouleuterium - the building of the city council (bule), prytaneum - a place for meetings of the ruling board of prytans, dicastery - a court building, etc. On the agora, new laws and orders were exhibited for public viewing government.

Among the buildings of the archaic city, the temples of the main Olympian gods and famous heroes. Parts of the outer walls of the Greek temple were painted in bright colors and richly decorated with sculpture (also painted). The temple was considered the home of the deity, and he was present in it in the form of his image.

Initially it was just a rough wooden idol that bore a very distant resemblance to a human figure.

However, by the end of the archaic era, the Greeks had already improved so much in plastic art that the statues of gods carved from marble or cast in bronze could easily pass for living people (the Greeks imagined their gods as humanoid creatures endowed with the gift of immortality and superhuman power). On holidays, the god, dressed in his best clothes (for such occasions, each temple had a special wardrobe), crowned with a golden wreath, graciously accepted gifts and sacrifices from the citizens of the polis, who came to the temple in a solemn procession. Before approaching the shrine, the procession passed through the city to the sound of flutes, garlands of fresh flowers and lighted torches, accompanied by an armed escort. Celebrations in honor of the deity of this polis were celebrated with special splendor.

Each policy had its own special patron or patroness. So, in Athens it was Pallas Athena. in Argos - Hera, in Corinth - Aphrodite, in Delphi - Apollo. The temple of the “city ruler” god was usually located in the city citadel, which the Greeks called the acropolis, that is, the “upper city.” The state porridge of the policy was kept here. Fines levied for various crimes and all other types of state income were received here). In Athens already in the 6th century. The top of the impregnable rock of the acropolis was crowned with a monumental temple of Athena, the main goddess of the city.

It is known how much of a place athletic competitions occupied in the life of the ancient Greeks. Since ancient times, special areas for youth exercise were set up in Greek cities - they were called gymnasiums. and palaestrums. Young men and teenagers spent entire days there, regardless of the time of year, diligently practicing god, wrestling, fist fights, jumping, throwing javelin and discus. Not a single major holiday was complete without a mass athletic competition - an agon, in which all free-born citizens of the polis, as well as specially invited foreigners, could take part.

Some agons, which were especially popular, turned into intercity pan-Greek festivals. These are the famous Olympic Games, which attracted athletes and “fans” from all over the Greek world, including even the most distant colonies, every four years. The participating states prepared for them no less seriously than for the upcoming military campaign. Victory or defeat at Olympia was a matter of prestige for each polis. Grateful fellow citizens showered the Olympic winner with truly royal honors (sometimes they even dismantled the city wall to clear the way for the triumphal chariot of the winner: it was believed that a person of such rank could not pass through an ordinary gate).

These are the basic elements that made up the daily life of a citizen of the Greek polis in the archaic era, as well as in later times: commercial transactions in the agora, debates in the people's assembly, participation in the most important religious ceremonies, athletic exercises and competitions.

And since all these types of spiritual and physical activities could only be done in the city, the Greeks did not imagine normal human life outside the city walls. This was the only way of life they considered worthy free man- a real Hellenic, and in this special way of life they saw their main difference from all the surrounding “barbarian” peoples.

Generated by the powerful surge of economic activity that accompanied the Great Colonization, the early Greek city in turn became an important factor in further economic and social progress. The urban way of life, with its characteristic intensive exchange of goods and other types of economic activity, in which masses of people of various origins took part, from the very beginning came into conflict with the then structure of Greek society, based on two main principles: the principle of class hierarchy, separating all people on the “best” or “noble” and the “worst” or “low-born”, and the principle of strict isolation of individual clan unions both from each other and from the whole outside world. In the cities, which had already begun earlier, in connection with the resettlement to the colonies, the process of breaking down inter-clan barriers proceeded at a particularly rapid pace. People belonging to different kinds, phyla and phratria, not only now live side by side, in the same quarters, but also enter into business and simply friendly contacts, and enter into marriage alliances. Gradually, the line separating the ancient family nobility from wealthy merchants and landowners who came from the common people begins to blur. These two layers are merging into a single ruling class of slave owners. The main role in this process was played by money - the most accessible and most mobile type of property. This was well understood by contemporaries of the events described. “Money is held in high esteem by everyone. Wealth mixed the breeds,” exclaims the Megarian poet of the 6th century. Theognis.

The growth of cities is associated with progress in the field of internal and international law. The need for further development of commodity-money relations, uniting the entire population of the polis into a single civil collective was difficult to reconcile with the traditional principles of tribal law and morality, according to which every stranger - coming from another clan or phratry - was perceived as a potential enemy, subject to destruction or transformation into slave In the archaic era, these views gradually begin to give way to broader and more humane views, according to which there is a kind of divine justice that applies equally to all people, regardless of their clan or tribal affiliation. We encounter such an idea already in the “Works and Days” of Hesiod, the Boeotian poet of the 8th century. BC e., although it is completely alien to his closest predecessor, Homer. The gods, in Hesiod's understanding, closely monitor the right and wrong deeds of people. For this purpose, “three myriads of immortal guards were sent to earth... spies of the right and evil of human affairs, they roam the world everywhere, clothed in a foggy darkness” (Hereinafter, translations by V.V. Veresaev.).

The main guardian of the law is the daughter of Zeus - the goddess Dike (“Justice”). The real progress of social legal consciousness is evidenced by the most ancient collections of laws attributed to famous legislators: Dracon, Zalevko, Charond, etc. Judging by the surviving passages, these codes were still very imperfect and contained many archaic legal norms and customs: basically the laws of Draco and their kind were a record of pre-existing customary law. Many of these laws have their roots in the depths of the primitive era, such as the exotic custom of bringing to justice animals that have “committed murder” and inanimate objects, which we encounter in one of the fragments that have come down to us from the laws of Draco. At the same time, the very fact of recording the law cannot but be assessed as a positive shift, since it testifies to the desire to put a limit to the arbitrariness of influential families and clans and to achieve the subordination of the clan to the judicial authority of the polis. The recording of laws and the introduction of proper legal proceedings contributed to the eradication of such ancient customs as blood feud or bribes for murder. Now murder is no longer considered a private matter between two families: the family of the killer and the family of his victim. The entire community, represented by its judicial authorities, participates in resolving the dispute.

Advanced standards of morality and law apply in this era not only to compatriots, but also to foreigners, citizens of other policies. The corpse of a killed enemy was no longer subjected to abuse (cf., for example, the Iliad, where Achilles violated the body of the deceased Hector), but was given to relatives to be buried. Free Hellenes captured in war, as a rule, are not killed or turned into slaves, but are returned to their homeland for a ransom. Measures are being taken to eradicate maritime piracy and robbery on land. Individual policies enter into agreements with each other, guaranteeing the personal safety and inviolability of citizens’ property if they find themselves on foreign territory. These steps towards rapprochement were caused by a real need for closer economic and cultural contacts. To a certain extent, this led to the overcoming of the former isolation of individual policies and the gradual development of pan-Greek, or, as they said then, panhellenic, patriotism. However, things did not go beyond these first attempts. The Greeks still did not become a single people.

It was cities that in the archaic period were the main centers of achievements of advanced culture. A new writing system, the alphabet, became widespread here.

It was much more convenient than the syllabary of the Mycenaean era: it consisted of only 24 characters, each of which had a firmly established phonetic meaning. If in Mycenaean society literacy was available only to a few initiates who were part of a closed group of professional scribes, now it becomes the common property of all citizens of the polis (everyone could master the basic skills of writing and reading in primary school). The new writing system was the first to become a truly universal means of transmitting information, which could be used with equal success in business correspondence and for recording lyric poetry or philosophical aphorisms. All this led to a rapid increase in literacy among the population of Greek city-states and, undoubtedly, contributed to the further progress of culture in all its main areas.

However, all this progress, as usually happens in history, also had its dark side. The rapid development of commodity-money relations, which brought to life the first cities with their advanced, life-affirming culture, had a negative impact on the position of the Greek peasantry. The agrarian crisis, which was the main cause of the Great Colonization, not only did not subside, but, on the contrary, began to rage with even greater force. Almost everywhere in Greece we observe the same bleak picture: the peasants are going bankrupt en masse, losing their “father's allotments” and joining the ranks of farm laborers - fetes. Characterizing the situation in Athens at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC e., before Solon’s reforms, Aristotle wrote: “We must keep in mind that in general the political system was oligarchic, but the main thing was that the poor were enslaved not only themselves, but also their children and wives. They were called pelates and shestidolniks, because on such lease terms they cultivated the fields of the rich (It’s not clear what Aristotle wanted to say with this phrase. Hexadolniks could give the landowner either 5/6 or 1/6 of the harvest. The latter seems more likely, since With existing agricultural technology, it is unlikely that a peasant could feed his family with one sixth of the harvest from a plot of such size that he could cultivate together with his wife and children.). All the land was in the hands of a few. Moreover, if these poor people did not pay rent, they and their children could be taken into bondage. And everyone’s loans were secured by personal bondage until the time of Solon.” To one degree or another, this characteristic applies to all other regions of what was then Greece.

The radical disruption of the usual way of life had a very painful effect on the consciousness of the people of the archaic era. In Hesiod's poem "Works and Days" the entire history of mankind is presented as a continuous decline and movement back from better to worse. On earth, according to the poet, four human generations have already changed: the golden, silver, copper and generation of heroes. Each of them lived worse than the previous one, but the most difficult lot went to the fifth, iron generation of people, to which Hesiod himself counts himself. “If only I could avoid living with the generation of the fifth century! - the poet exclaims sadly. “I would like to die before him or be born later.”

The consciousness of his helplessness in the face of the “gift-eating kings” (“Kings” (basilei) in the Lord, as in Homer, are representatives of the local clan nobility standing at the head of the community.), apparently, especially oppressed the poet-peasants and on the. This is reflected in Hesiod’s poem “The Fable of the Nightingale and the Hawk”:

Now I will tell the kings a fable about how foolish they are. This is what a hawk once said to a quiet nightingale. The claws sank into him and carried him in the high clouds. The nightingale squealed pitifully, pierced by its crooked claws. The same one imperiously addressed him with the following speech: “Why are you, unfortunate one, squealing? After all, I am much stronger than you! No matter how you sing, I will take you wherever I want, And I can dine on you and set you free. He who wants to compare himself with the strongest has no reason; No matter if he defeats him, he will only add grief to his misfortune!” That's what the swift hawk said, the long-winged bird.

At the time when Hesiod created his Works and Days, the power of the clan nobility in most Greek city-states remained unshakable.

After some hundred years, the picture changes radically.

We learn about this from the poems of another poet, a native of Megara, Theognis. Theognis, although by birth he belonged to the highest nobility, feels very insecure in this changing world before his eyes and, like Hesiod, is inclined to be very pessimistic about his era. He is tormented by the awareness of the irreversibility of the social changes taking place around him:

Our city is still a city, O Kirn, but the people are different,

Who hitherto knew neither the laws nor justice, Who dressed his body with worn-out goat fur

And behind the city wall he grazed like a wild deer.

From now on he became noble.

And the people who were noble

They became low. Well, who could endure all this?

Theognis's poems show that the process of property stratification of the community affected not only the peasantry, but also the nobility. Many aristocrats, overwhelmed by the thirst for profit, invested their fortunes in various commercial enterprises and speculations, but, lacking sufficient practical insight, went bankrupt, giving way to more tenacious and resourceful people from the lower classes, who, thanks to their wealth, are now rising to the very top of the social ladder. These “upstarts” evoke wild anger and hatred in the soul of the aristocratic poet. In his dreams, he sees the people returned to their former, semi-slave state:

Step on the chest of the vain-minded rabble with a firm foot, Beat it with a copper butt, bend its neck under the yoke!.. There is no people under the all-seeing sun, there is no people in the wide world, To voluntarily endure the strong reins of the masters... (Translation by L. Piotrovsky.)

Reality, however, shatters these illusions of the herald of aristocratic reaction. Going back is no longer possible, and the poet is aware of this.

Theognis's poems captured the height of the class struggle, the moment when the mutual enmity and hatred of the fighting parties reached its highest point. A powerful democratic movement at this time swept the cities of the Northern Peloponnese, including the hometown of Theognis Megara, also Attica, the island cities of the Aegean Sea, the Ionian cities of Asia Minor and even the remote western colonies of Italy and Sicily.

Everywhere, democrats put forward the same slogans: “Redistribution of land and cancellation of debts”, “Equality of all citizens of the polis before the law”) (isonomia), “Transfer of power to the people” (democracy). This democratic movement was heterogeneous in its social composition. Rich merchants from the common people, wealthy peasants, artisans, and the dispossessed masses of the rural and urban poor took part in it. If the former sought, first of all, political equality with the ancient nobility, the latter were much more attracted to the idea of universal property equality, which in those conditions meant a return back to the traditions of the communal clan system, to regular redistribution of land. In many places, desperate peasants tried to put Hesiod's patriarchal utopia into practice and bring humanity back to a "golden age." Inspired by this idea, they seized the property of the rich and nobles and divided it among themselves, throwing off the hated mortgage pillars from their fields (These pillars were erected by the creditor on the debtor’s field as a sign that the field was a guarantee of payment of the debt and could be taken away in case of non-payment. ), burned the debt books of moneylenders. In defending their property, the rich increasingly resort to terror and violence, and thus the class enmity that has accumulated over centuries develops into a real civil war. Uprisings and coups d'etat, accompanied by brutal murders, mass expulsions and confiscations of the property of the vanquished, became commonplace at this time in the life of the Greek city-states. Theognis, in one of his elegies, addresses the reader with a warning:

Let our city still rest in complete silence, - Believe me, she may not reign in the city for long. Where bad people begin to strive for this, so that they can benefit from the people's passions. For from here - uprisings, civil wars, murders, Also monarchs - protect us from them, fate!

The mention of monarchs in the last line is very symptomatic:

in many Greek states, a socio-political crisis that sometimes lasted for decades was resolved by the establishment of a regime of personal power.

Exhausted by endless internal unrest and strife, the city community could no longer resist the claims of influential persons to individual power, and the dictatorship of a “strong man” was established in the city, who ruled without regard for the law and traditional institutions: the council, the people’s assembly, etc. The Greeks called such usurpers tyrants (This word itself was borrowed by the Greeks from the Lydian language and initially did not have an abusive meaning.), contrasting them with the ancient kings - basilei, who ruled on the basis of hereditary law or popular election. Having seized power, the tyrant began reprisals against his political opponents. They were executed without trial or investigation. Entire families and even clans were sent into exile, and their property went into the treasury of the tyrant. In later historical tradition, mostly hostile to tyranny, the word “tyranny” itself became Greek synonymous with merciless bloody tyranny. Most often, the victims of repression were people from ancient aristocratic families. The spearhead of the tyrants' terrorist policy was directed against the family nobility. Not content with the physical extermination of the most prominent representatives of this social group, the tyrants infringed on her interests in every possible way, forbidding aristocrats to do gymnastics, gather for joint meals and drinking bouts, and purchase slaves and luxury goods. The nobility, which was the most organized and at the same time the most influential and wealthy part of the community, posed the greatest danger to the sole power of the tyrant. From this side he constantly had to expect conspiracies, assassinations, and rebellions.

The relationship between the tyrant and the people was different. Many tyrants of the archaic era began their political careers as prostates, that is, leaders and defenders of the demos. The famous Pisistratus, who seized power over Athens in 562 BC. e., relied on the support of the poorest part of the Athenian peasantry, which lived mainly in the interior mountainous regions of Attica. The tyrant's "guard", provided to Peisistratus at his request by the Athenian people, consisted of a detachment of three hundred people armed with clubs - the usual weapon of the Greek peasantry at that time of troubles. With the help of these “club bearers,” Pisistratus captured the Athenian acropolis and thus became master of the situation in the city. While in power, the tyrant appeased the demos with gifts, free treats and entertainment during the holidays. Thus, Peisistratus introduced cheap agricultural credit in Athens, lending equipment, seeds, and livestock to needy peasants. He established two new national festivals; The Great Panathenaea and the City Dionysia and celebrated them with extraordinary pomp (The program of the City Dionysia included theatrical performances. According to legend, in 536 BC, under Pisistratus, the first tragedy in the history of Greek theater was staged.). The desire to achieve popularity among the people also dictated the city improvement measures attributed to many tyrants: the construction of water pipelines and fountains, the construction of new magnificent temples, porticos on the agora, port buildings, etc. All this, however, does not yet give us the right to consider the tyrants themselves "fighters" for the people's cause. The main goal of the tyrants was to fully strengthen their rule over the polis and, in the future, to create a hereditary dynasty. The tyrant could carry out these plans only by breaking the resistance of the nobility. For this, he needed the support of the demos, or at least benevolent neutrality on its part. In their “love of the people,” tyrants usually did not go beyond minor handouts and demagogic promises to the crowd. None of the tyrants we know tried to put into practice the main slogans of the democratic movement: “Redistribution of land” and “Cancellation of debts.” None of them did anything to democratize the political system of the polis. On the contrary, constantly in need of money to pay salaries to mercenaries, for their construction enterprises and other needs, the tyrants imposed previously unknown taxes on their subjects. Thus, under Pisistratus, the Athenians annually contributed 1/10 of their income to the tyrant’s treasury. In general, tyranny not only did not contribute to the further development of the slave state, but, on the contrary, slowed it down.

Tactics used by tyrants against the masses, can be defined as “carrot and stick politics”.

While flirting with the demos and trying to win him over to their side as a possible ally in the fight against the nobility, the tyrants at the same time feared the people. To protect themselves from this side, they often resorted to disarming the citizens of the policy and at the same time surrounded themselves with hired bodyguards from among foreigners or freed slaves. Any gathering of people on a city street or square aroused suspicion in the tyrant; it seemed to him that the citizens were up to something, preparing a rebellion or an assassination attempt; The tyrant's home was usually located in the city citadel - on the acropolis. Only here, in his fortified nest, could he feel at least relatively safe.

Naturally, in such conditions there was and could not be a truly strong alliance between the tyrant and the demos. The only real support for the regime of personal power in the Greek city-states, in essence, was the hired guard of tyrants. Tyranny left a noticeable mark on the history of early Greece. The colorful figures of the first tyrants - Periander, Pisistratus, Polycrates and others - invariably attracted the attention of later Greek historians. Legends about their extraordinary power and wealth, about their superhuman luck, which aroused the envy of even the gods themselves, were passed down from generation to generation - such is the well-known legend about the ring of Polycrates, preserved by Herodotus (The legend says that who was visiting Polycrates, the tyrant of the island of Samos, The Egyptian king advised him to sacrifice the most precious thing he had, so that the gods would not envy his happiness. Polycrates threw his ring into the sea, but the next day the fisherman brought him a large fish as a gift, and the abandoned ring was found in its belly. The Egyptian king left Polycrates, considering him doomed, and soon he actually died.). In an effort to add more shine to their rule and perpetuate their name, many tyrants attracted outstanding musicians, poets, and artists to their courts. Such Greek city-states as Corinth, Sikyon, Athens, Samos, Miletus, under the rule of tyrants became rich, prosperous cities, decorated with new magnificent buildings. Some of the tyrants pursued quite successful foreign policies.

Periander, who ruled Corinth from 627 to 585 BC. e., managed to create a large colonial power, stretching from the islands of the Ionian Sea to the shores of the Adriatic. The famous tyrant of the island

Samos Polycrates in a short time brought under his rule most of the island states of the Aegean Sea. Pisistratus successfully struggled to master the important by sea, connecting Greece through the corridor of the straits and the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea region. Nevertheless, the contribution of tyrants to the socio-economic and cultural development of archaic Greece cannot be exaggerated. In this matter we can fully rely on the sober and impartial assessment of tyranny that was given by the greatest of the Greek historians, Thucydides. “All the tyrants who were in the Hellenic states,” he wrote, “directed their concerns exclusively to their interests, to the security of their personality and to the exaltation of their home. Therefore, when governing the state, they were primarily, as far as possible, concerned with taking measures for their own safety; They have not accomplished a single remarkable deed, except perhaps the wars of individual tyrants with border residents.” But having a strong social support among the masses, tyranny could not become a stable form of government in the Greek polis. Later Greek historians and philosophers, for example Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, saw in tyranny an abnormal, unnatural state of the state, a kind of disease of the polis caused by political unrest and social upheaval, and were sure that this state could not last long.

Indeed, only a few of the Greek tyrants of the archaic period managed not only to retain the throne they had seized, but also to pass it on as an inheritance to their children (The longest reign was the Orphagorid dynasty in Sikyon (670-510 BC). On The Corinthian Cypselids (657-583 BC) are in second place, and the Peisistratids (560-510 BC) are in third place.

Tyranny only weakened the clan nobility, but could not completely break its power, and, probably, did not strive to do so. In many cities, after the overthrow of the tirapia, outbreaks of intense struggle were again observed. But in the cycle of civil wars, a new type of state is gradually emerging - a slave-owning policy.

The formation of the polis was the result of the persistent transformative activities of many generations of Greek legislators. We know almost nothing about most of them. (The ancient tradition has brought to us only a few names, among which the names of two outstanding Athenian reformers - Solon and Cleisthenes and the great Spartan legislator Lycurgus - occupy a particularly prominent place. As a rule, the most significant transformations were carried out in an environment of acute political crisis. There are a number of cases when citizens of one state or another, driven to despair by endless strife and unrest and seeing no other way out of the situation, elected one of their midst as a mediator and conciliator.

One of these conciliators was Solon. Elected in 594 BC. e. to the post of first archon (Archons (literally, “in charge”) - a ruling board of officials, consisting of nine people. The first archon was considered the chairman of the board. A year was designated by his name in Athens.) with the rights of a legislator, he developed and implemented a broad program of social - economic and political changes, the ultimate goal of which was to restore the unity of the city community, split by civil strife into warring political factions. The most important among Solon's reforms was a radical reform of the law of debt, which went down in history under the figurative name of “shaking off the burden” (seisakhteya). Solon actually threw off the hated burden of debt bondage from the shoulders of the Athenian people, declaring all debts and the interest accrued on them invalid and prohibiting self-mortgage transactions in the future. Seisachtheia saved the peasantry of Attica from enslavement and thereby made possible the further development of democracy in Athens. Subsequently, the legislator himself proudly wrote about this service of his to the Athenian people: What kind of person am I?

Mother Black Earth, the pillars erected, could have said it better than anyone else.

Slave before

(Translation by S.I. Radzig.)

didn’t complete those tasks, then he rallied the people,

before Time, the highest court of the Olympians - from which I then removed many debts,

now free. Having freed the Athenian demos from the debt that weighed on him, Solon, however, refused to fulfill his other demand - to redistribute the land. According to Solon himself, it was not his intention to “give the poor and the noble an equal share in the wealth of his relatives,” that is, to completely equalize the nobility and the common people in property and socially. Solon only tried to stop the further growth of large landownership and thereby put a limit to the dominance of the nobility in the economy of Athens. Solon's law is known, which prohibited the acquisition of land above a certain norm. Obviously, these measures were successful, since later, throughout the 6th and 5th centuries. BC e., Attica remained predominantly a country of medium and small land ownership, in which even the largest slaveholding farms exceeded the area of several tens of hectares.

Another important step towards the democratization of the Athenian state and strengthening of its internal unity was taken at the end of the 6th century. (between 509 and 507) Cleisthenes (Between Solon and

Cleisthenes was ruled in Athens by the tyrant Peisistratus, and then by his sons. Tyranny was abolished in 510 BC. e.). If Solop's reforms undermined the economic power of the nobility, then Cleisthenes, although he himself came from a noble family, went even further. The main support of the aristocratic regime in Athens, as well as in all other Greek states, were clan associations - the so-called phyles and phratries. Since ancient times, the entire Athenian demos was divided into four phylas, each of which included three phratries. At the head of each phratry was a noble family in charge of its religious affairs. Ordinary members of the phratry were obliged to submit to the religious and political authority of their "leaders", providing them with support in all their undertakings.

Occupying a dominant position in clan alliances, the aristocracy kept the entire mass of the demos under its control. It was against this political organization that Clisthep directed his main blow. He introduced a new, purely territorial system of administrative division, distributing all citizens into ten phylas and one hundred smaller units - demes. The phyla established by Cleisthenes had nothing to do with the old generic phyla.

Moreover, they were drawn up in such a way that persons belonging to the same clans and phratries would henceforth be politically separated, living in different territorial administrative districts. Cleisthenes, as Aristotle put it, “mixed together the entire population of Attica,” regardless of its traditional political and religious ties. In this way, he managed to solve three important problems simultaneously: 1) the Athenian demos, and first of all the peasantry, which constituted a very significant and at the same time the most conservative part of it, was freed from the ancient clan traditions on which the political influence of the nobility was based; 2) the often arising feuds between individual clan unions, which threatened the internal unity of the Athenian state, were stopped; 3) those who had previously stood outside the phratries and philes and, as a result, did not enjoy civil rights, were attracted to participate in political life. Cleisthenes' reforms completed the first stage of the struggle for democracy in Athens. During this struggle, the Athenian demos achieved great success, grew politically and became stronger. The will of the demos, expressed through a general vote in the people's assembly (ekklesia), acquires the force of a law binding on all. All officials, not excluding the highest ones - archons and strategists (Strategos in Athens were the military leaders who commanded the army and navy. A board of ten strategists was established by Cleisthenes.), are elected and are obliged to report to the people in their actions, and in that case, if any offense is committed on their part, they may be subjected to severe punishment.

The council of five hundred (bule) created by Cleisthenes and the jury (helium) established by Solon worked hand in hand with the popular assembly. The Council of Five Hundred performed the functions of a kind of presidium at the national assembly, engaging in preliminary discussion and processing of all proposals and bills, which were then submitted for final approval to the ecclesia. Therefore, the decrees of the national assembly in Athens usually began with the formula: “The council and the people decided.” As for helia, it was the highest court in Athens, to which all citizens could file complaints about unfair decisions of officials. Both the council and the jury were chosen by lot among the ten phyla established by Cleisthenes. Thanks to this, ordinary citizens could also join them on an equal basis with representatives of the nobility. In this they were fundamentally different from the old aristocratic council and court - the Areopagus.

However, the complete triumph of democratic ideals was still far away. The system of government that emerged as a result of the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes was assessed by the ancients as a moderate form of democracy. Highest value In the political life of Athens, a layer of wealthy peasantry was used, pushing into the background both the old landed nobility and the trade and craft layers of the urban population. Wealthy peasants are zevgits (3evgit - from the Greek zevgos - “yoke”, “team”. A team of two oxen was the main labor force in the peasant’s household (perhaps this word comes from the place that the warrior hired in the ranks. - Ed. .).) formed the politically active core of the people's assembly. They also formed a heavily armed hoplite militia, which now becomes decisive force on the battlefields, almost completely displacing the aristocratic cavalry from them. Peasants with little land, as well as the urban poor, did not yet take an active part in governing the state at that time, although formally both of them were considered Athenian citizens. It should be borne in mind that since the time of Solon, access to many of the government institutions was limited in Athens by a high property qualification. Thus, only a person who belonged to the category of Zevgits, that is, one who received at least two hundred measures of annual income from his land, could become a member of the council. The highest qualification was established for the position of archon - no less than five hundred measures of annual income. Representatives of the last, fourth category of fet (Fet - literally, “day laborers”, “farmers”. This category included citizens who received less than two hundred measures of annual income from land, as well as those who had no land at all) were admitted only to the people's assembly and to the jury. It took decades of persistent political struggle for the principle of civil equality to be consistently implemented in Athens.

Athenian democracy gives an idea of only one of the possible ways of development of the early Greek polis. During the Archaic period, many very diverse types and forms of polis organization arose in Greece. One of the most unique variants of the polis system developed in Sparta, the largest of the Dorian states of the Peloponnese. Since ancient times, the socio-economic development of Spartan society has not taken the usual direction. The Dorians who founded Sparta came to Laconia as conquerors and enslavers of the local Achaean population. From about the middle of the 8th century. In Sparta, as in many other Greek states, acute land hunger began to be felt. The problem of excess population that arose in connection with this required an immediate solution, and the Spartans solved it in their own way: they found a way out by expanding their territory at the expense of their closest neighbors. The main target of Spartan aggression was Messenia, a rich and vast region in the southwestern part of the Peloponnese. The struggle for Messinia, which took place in the 8th-7th centuries. BC e., ultimately ended with the complete conquest and enslavement of its population. The seizure of fertile Messenian lands allowed the Spartan government to halt the impending agrarian crisis. In Sparta, a wide redistribution of land was carried out and a stable land tenure system was created, based on a strict correspondence between the number of plots and the number of full citizens. The entire land was divided into 9,000 plots of approximately equal profitability, which were distributed to the corresponding number of Spartiates (Spartiates are the usual name for full citizens of Sparta in the sources.). Subsequently, the government of Sparta carefully ensured that the size of individual plots remained unchanged all the time (they could not, for example, be divided when transferred by inheritance), and they themselves could not change hands through donations, wills, sales, etc. d. State slaves-helots from among the conquered inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia, attached to the land, were also divided. This was done in such a way that for each Spartan clere (land plot) there would be several carnal families, who with their labor provided the owner of the clere and his entire family with everything necessary.

As a result of this reform, the Spartan demos turned into a closed class of professional hoplite warriors, who exercised their dominance over the many thousands of helots by force of arms.

The forced labor of the helots relieved the Spartiates of the need to earn their own food and left them maximum free time to engage in government affairs and improve their art of war. The latter was all the more necessary because after the conquest of Messenia, an extremely tense situation was created in Sparta: the main commandment of the slave economy, later formulated by Aristotle, was violated: to avoid the accumulation of large masses of slaves of one ethnic origin. The helots, who made up the majority among the working population of Sparta, spoke the same language and dreamed only of throwing off the hated yoke of the Spartan conquerors (According to Herodotus, in the Spartan army that fought against the Persians at Plataea (479 BC). BC), for each full-fledged Spartiate there were seven helots.). It was possible to keep them in obedience only through systematic, merciless terror.

The constant threat of carnal rebellion required maximum unity and organization of the Spartiates. Therefore, simultaneously with the redistribution of land in Sparta, a whole series of reforms were carried out, which went down in history under the name of the “laws of /1icurgus” (no reliable evidence of the life and work of Lycurgus has survived. It was not possible to establish with sufficient accuracy the time of his reforms. Many modern historians believe his fictitious personality. It is most likely that the “Lycurgian system” took shape in its final form no earlier than the end of the 7th - beginning of the 6th century BC - Ed. note). These reforms in a short time changed the appearance of the Spartan state beyond recognition, turning it into a military camp, all the inhabitants of which were subject to barracks discipline. From the moment of birth to death, the Spartiate was under the constant supervision of special officials (they were called zfori, i.e. “overseers”), who were obliged to monitor the strict observance of the laws of Lycurgus by all citizens.

These laws provided for everything down to the smallest details, such as the cut of clothing and the shape of the beard and mustache that the citizens of Sparta were allowed to wear. The law strictly obliged each Spartiate to send his sons, as soon as they turned seven years old, to special camps - agels (lit., “herd”), where they were subjected to brutal drill, cultivating in the younger generation endurance, cunning, cruelty, the ability to command and obey and other qualities necessary for a “real Spartan”. Adult Spartiates compulsorily attended joint meals - sissitia, allocating a certain amount of food monthly for their organization. In the hands of the ruling elite of the Spartan state, sissitii and angels were a convenient means of controlling the behavior and sentiments of ordinary citizens. The state in Sparta actively intervened in personal life citizens, regulating childbirth and marital relations.

In accordance with the principle of the “Lycurgian system,” all full-fledged citizens of Sparta were officially called “equals,” and these were not empty words. In Sparta, a whole system of measures was in effect for almost two centuries aimed at minimizing any opportunities for personal enrichment and thereby stopping the growth of property inequality among the Spartans. For this purpose, gold and silver coins were withdrawn from circulation. According to legend, Lycurgus replaced it with heavy and uncomfortable iron obols, which had long since fallen into disuse outside Laconia. Trade and craft were considered in Sparta to be occupations that dishonored a citizen. They could only be dealt with by the perieki, (literally, “living around”) - the disadvantaged population of small towns scattered throughout the territory of Laconia and Messenia at some distance from Sparta itself. Almost all paths to the accumulation of wealth were closed to the citizens of this extraordinary state. However, even if one of them managed to make a fortune, he still would not be able to use it under the watchful supervision of the Spartan morality police. All Spartiates, regardless of their origin and social status - no exceptions were made even for the “kings” who were at the head of the state (Starting from ancient times, Sparta was ruled by two “kings” belonging to two different dynasties. The power of the “kings” was lifelong, in its opinion limited constant supervision by the ephors. The “kings” enjoyed full power only during war as the supreme commanders of the Spartan army.) - they lived in exactly the same conditions, like soldiers in a barracks, wore the same simple and rough clothes, ate the same food in common table in sissitia, they used the same household utensils. A strict ban was imposed on the production and consumption of the most insignificant luxury goods in Sparta. Periek artisans made only the simplest and most necessary utensils, tools and weapons to equip the Spartan army. The import of foreign products into Sparta was strictly prohibited by law. The Spartan government managed to unite the citizens in the face of the enslaved helots, who were constantly ready for indignation. Possessing a large reserve of internal strength, the “community of equals” was subsequently able to withstand such serious tests as, for example, the great uprising of the helots of 464 (the so-called III Messenian War) or the Peloponnesian War of 431 - 404. BC e. The persistent military training, which the Spartans indulged in throughout their lives with unremitting zeal, also bore fruit. The famous Spartan phalanx (heavily armed infantry kept in close formation) for a long time had no equal on the battlefields and deservedly enjoyed the glory of invincibility. Sparta managed even before the beginning of the 5th century. BC e. establish its hegemony over for the most part Peloponnese, and subsequently tried to extend it to the rest of Greece. However, the great power claims of Sparta were based only on its military strength. Economically and culturally, it lagged far behind other Greek states. The establishment of the “Lycurgian system” sharply slowed down the development of the Spartan economy, returning it back almost to the stage of the subsistence economy of the Homeric era. In the atmosphere of a harsh military-police regime with its cult of equality brought to the point of absurdity, the bright and unique culture of archaic Sparta gradually withered away and then completely disappeared (Archaeological excavations on the territory of Sparta showed that in the 7th - first half of the 6th century there was one of the most significant centers of artistic craft throughout Greece.The products of footman artisans of this time are not inferior to the best products of Athenian, Corinthian and Euboean craftsmen.). After Tyrtaeus, who glorified the feats accomplished by Spartan warriors during the Messenian Wars, Sparta did not produce a single significant poet, not a single philosopher, orator, or scientist. Complete stagnation in socio-economic and political life and extreme spiritual impoverishment - this was the price the Spartans had to pay for their dominance over the helots. Closed in on itself, fenced off from the outside world with a blank wall of hostility and mistrust, Sparta is gradually becoming the main center of political reaction in Greece, the hope and support of all enemies of democracy.

So, we have become acquainted with the two extreme, most different forms of the early Greek polis. The first of these two forms, which emerged in Athens as a result of the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes, provided citizens with harmonious personal development and turned out to be more capable of development and, therefore, historically more promising in comparison with the second - the barracks Spartan form of the polis. Athens did not know the complete political discrimination typical of Sparta against all people working manually. It was Athens that was destined to become in the future the main stronghold of Greek democracy and at the same time the largest cultural center of Greece, the “school of Hellas,” as Thucydides would later say.

Speaking about the significant differences in the social and state structure of Athens and Sparta, we should not lose sight of what they have in common, which allows us to consider them two varieties of the same type of state, namely the polis. Any polis is a self-governing, or, as the Greeks said, an autonomous community, most often not extending beyond the boundaries of one, usually small city and its immediate surroundings (hence the generally accepted translation of the term polis in modern scientific literature - “city-state”). States that exceed in size this norm, which is usual for a polis, are found in Greece only as an exception (examples include Athens and Sparta, on the territory of which, in addition to the main city that gave its name to its state, there were also other cities). The main feature of the polis organization, which distinguishes it from all other types of slave-owning state, is that here all members of a given community, and not just a select part of them, participate in the management of the state to some extent, although, of course, far from equally. , part of an extremely narrow circle of court nobility, as we most often see in the monarchies of the ancient East, the civil community (demos) practically merges here with the state (Of course, it should be borne in mind that the size and number of the polis communities themselves could fluctuate very widely limits depending on those criteria civil rights, which were used in various Greek states. If in Athens: during the heyday of democracy in the second half of the 5th century. There were about 45 thousand full citizens, then in Sparta their number, even during the years of the highest rise of its power, did not exceed 9-10 thousand people. However, in Greece there were also policies in which the entire civil collective consisted of several hundred or even several dozen people.).

Even in the most conservative and politically backward Greek city-states like Sparta, all full-fledged citizens had access to the people's assembly, which was considered the bearer of the highest sovereign power in the state (This principle was already formulated in the oldest of all political documents that have come down to us - the so-called “Retro Lycurgus" (around the 8th century BC). Its final phrase read: "Let power and authority belong to the people."). Being an expression of the collective will of the citizens of the polis, the decisions of the people's assembly had the force of a generally binding law. This reveals the most important political principle underlying the polis organization - the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority, of the individual to the collective. We have already seen above, using the example of Sparta, what paradoxical forms this omnipotence of law sometimes took. And in other Greek states, the power of the collective, formalized as law, over the personality and property of an individual citizen often extended very far. In Athens, for example, any person, no matter how high a position in society he occupied, could be expelled from the state without any fault on his part only on the grounds that the majority of his fellow citizens wanted it (In such cases, a general vote was held, in in which clay shards served as ballots. Hence the name of this procedure - ostracism, literally, “cutting.” Each of the voting participants wrote on his shard the name of the person who, in his opinion, represented the this moment greatest danger to the state. That. who collected such a bunch greatest number votes, was expelled from Athens for a period of ten years. The invention of ostracism was attributed to Cleisthenes in antiquity. Note that the institution of ostracism presupposes universal literacy of citizens.). Using its right of supreme control over the lives and behavior of individual citizens, the polis actively intervened in the economy, restraining the growth of private property and thus smoothing out property inequality within the civil community.

Examples of such interference include the Solopovian seisakhteia in Athens, already known to us, the land redistribution attributed to Lycurgus in Sparta and similar economic reforms in other policies (In many policies, state control over the private property of citizens was systematic. Its most typical manifestations can be considered various prohibitions and restrictions , imposed on the purchase and sale of land, the so-called liturgy - duties in favor of the state, performed by the most prosperous citizens; laws against luxury, etc.).

For its time, the polis can be considered the most perfect form of political organization of the ruling class. Its main advantage over other forms and types of slave-owning states, for example, over Eastern despotism, lies in the comparative breadth and stability of its social base and in the broad opportunities that it provided for the development of private slave-owning economies. The polis community united both large and small owners, rich in land and slave owners and simply free peasants and artisans, guaranteeing each of them the inviolability of personality and property and at the same time a certain minimum of rights, and above all the ownership of land within the polis . The Greeks saw legal capacity as the main feature distinguishing a citizen from a non-citizen. At the same time, the polis was a military-political union of free owners, directed against all enslaved and exploited and pursuing two main goals: 1) to keep existing slaves in service; 2) organize military aggression against the countries of the “barbarian” world, thereby ensuring the replenishment of slave farms with the labor force they need.

§29 The Greek polis and its inhabitants

The Rhaic period is not separated from the Homeric period by a sharp chronological boundary: its beginning is determined approximately by the 8th century, the end by the beginning of the 5th century, sometimes by the end of the 1st quarter of the 5th century. The historical background of the period was the Great Greek Colonization, which expanded the boundaries of the world known to the Greeks. In the archaic era, lyric poetry arose and flourished (Sappho 29, Alcaeus, Alcman, Ibycus, Anacreon and many others), epic poetry continued to develop, and special genre historiography (logographer Hecataeus of Miletus), the first playwrights appeared (Thespis, etc.), the very system of dramatic theatrical performance was formed.

A characteristic feature of Greek archaic culture and the entire Greek civilization as a whole becomes agonistic thirty . Competitiveness permeates all areas of Greek activity: from sports, music, theater, poetry competitions to competition in the field of art, which has an undoubted impact on the ever-accelerating development and change in all branches of knowledge and experience among the Greeks 31 . In the archaic period, philosophy was born - Pythagoras was the first to call himself a philosopher 32. The greatest philosophers, or rather sages in the ancient sense, were representatives of the Milesian (Ionian) school, Thales, Heraclitus, etc. At the same time, the concept of a philosophical school arose, transmitting and developing the tradition from its founder: the very development of philosophical schools gradually became one from the cores connecting Greek thought until the end of ancient civilization itself.

For Greek art, this is an era of discovery: innovations in architecture, sculpture and painting determined the appearance of Greek culture as a whole. Never again has Greece known so many art schools, paths, richness, diversity and originality of searches. In the 7th-6th centuries. a type of Greek temple is emerging with a cella surrounded on all sides by a colonnade, with a pediment with a sculptural group dominating the front portico, Two main orders of Greek architecture were formed: strict Doric and graceful Ionic. The oldest of the Greek temples, known to us largely from remains, are the temples of Hera in Argos and Olympia and the temple of Apollo in Therma (Aetolia).

In Greek ceramics, stylistically very diverse, in the 8th century. The so-called Orientalizing (Eastern) manner, which is influenced by a strong Middle Eastern influence, is widespread. In the 7th century Athenian black-figure vase painting acquires a dominant position, and when the Athenian ceramists (Andocides) move into the middle. 6th century BC e. to the red-figure technique, this step is decisive for all Greek territories.

Greek classics

The highest point in the development of Greek culture and art of antiquity was the classical (from Latin classicus - exemplary) period , the beginning of which is usually attributed to the time after the Greco-Persian wars (480–470 BC), the end - to the time of the beginning of the aggressive campaigns of Alexander the Great at the end of the 4th century. BC e. The political background of the flourishing of culture and art in the classical era, a kind of analogue of it, was the flourishing of the democratic city-states of Greece (for example, Athens during the reign of Pericles 33). In the 5th century Greece survived the worst wars in its history and came under the rule of a stronger and politically unified Macedonia.

Sculpture

Physical perfection and spiritual beauty as a reflection of the highest nobility and dignity of man are the main meaning of the search for classical art. The great masters of Greek classical sculpture were Polykleitos - the creator of the famous “Spearman” (“Doriphoros”), in which he calculated the “correct” proportions of the human figure and for the first time tried to imagine a person in a calm movement-step; Miron, who developed the theme of complex foreshortening movement (the statue of the “Discus Thrower” - “Disco Thrower”); Phidias- probably the designer of the entire architectural and sculptural complex of the Acropolis in Athens, the highest creation of the Greek world, Praxiteles - the creator of the most famous statue of antiquity, “Aphrodite of Knidos,” who for the first time presented the human figure in a state of rest and peace (“Hermes with Dionysus,” “Resting Satyr,” etc.); Scopas and Lysippos, who for the first time depicted pain and suffering on the human face and no longer followed the canon of Polykleitos, but according to the ideas of pure artistry and plasticity. It was the art of Praxiteles, Lysippos and Scopas that had the strongest influence on Hellenistic sculpture.

Architecture

the architecture of the classical period created exemplary types Doric and Ionic temples(peripter, dipter, prostyle, amphiprostyle, etc.). In the 4th century. BC e. lush and graceful was introduced into the arsenal of architecture Corinthian order, gradually replacing the two main ones - Doric and Ionic. The temple construction of the era is represented by the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis, and the Temple of Apollo in Bassae. The best architects of this time were Iktin(Parthenon, temple in Bassae) and Callicrates(Parthenon, Temple of Nike Apteros on the Acropolis). The appearance of architectural buildings of the classical period is distinguished by clarity and simplicity, rigor and purity of lines. The great experiment of the era was the Acropolis complex in Athens, which combines buildings of different orders, elements of different orders in one building (Ionic frieze with the Panathenaic procession in the Parthenon, Doric peripterus). In the 5th and 4th centuries. BC e. The famous theater buildings of Greece are created - the Theater of Dionysus in Athens and the Theater in Epidaurus.

Literature

The literature of the classical period is the most representative corpus of the ancient world. Considered the father of tragedy Aeschylus, whose younger contemporaries were Sophocles, king of poets, and Euripides, the father of comedy and its largest representative - Aristophanes, the father of history - Herodotus. An outstanding historian of the 5th century. BC e. was also Thucydides- author of the history of the Peloponnesian War.

In the field of philosophy 5–4 centuries. BC e. - the time of its true and great flourishing, the expansion of the activities of philosophical schools (Socrates 34, Plato 35 - founder of the Academy, Aristotle 36 - founder of the Lyceum 37 and the Peripatetic school, etc.).