archaic period

The term means an early stage in the development of civilization. For example, in Egypt, A. p. covers the first two dynasties (3200-2800 BC), during which the country was united and the first flowering of its culture came. In Greece, A. p. corresponds to the formation of civilization (from 750 BC to the Persian invasion in 480 BC). In the understanding of Americanists, the term means not so much a chronological period as a stage in development. It is characterized by hunting and gathering as the basis of the economy in the post-Pleistocene environment. Under certain circumstances, tribes can move to a sedentary lifestyle, pottery making, and even farming, but in addition to collecting wild plants. The term was developed for certain crops of the forest belt of eastern North America (dated to 8000-1000 BC), but it was soon applied (often uncritically) to any other crops that showed a similar level of development without regard to their dating.

Archaeological dictionary. - M.: Progress. Warwick Bray, David Trump. Translation from English by G.A. Nikolaev. 1990 .

See what the "Archaic period" is in other dictionaries:

Archaic Southwest- Archaic southwest, Engl. The Archaic Southwest is a term that includes the archaeological cultures of the southwestern United States between approximately 6500 B.C. e. and 200 AD e. The cultures belonging to the specified period were ... Wikipedia

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Woodland period- Woodland period, eng. Woodland period in the pre-Columbian chronology of North America dates back to about 1000 BC. e. to 1000 AD e. in eastern North America. The term "Woodland" ... ... Wikipedia

Tribes of the Caucasus during the Eneolithic period- The largest center of copper production was located on the border of Asia and Europe in the Caucasus. This center was of particular importance because the Caucasus was directly connected with the advanced countries of the then world with the slave-owning states ... ... The World History. Encyclopedia

Archaic Greece

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Books

• archaic thinking. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, P. P. Fedorov, As a result of ethnographic research in the twentieth century, the question of special archaic thinking was raised: a savage is not more stupid than a civilized person, but he thinks differently (in the first place ... Category: Anthropology Publisher: URSS, Manufacturer: URSS, Buy for 735 UAH (Ukraine only)
• Early Greek tyranny Reader, Zhestokanov S. (ed.), Compiled by Associate Professor of St. Petersburg State University S. M. Zhestokanov, the reader is dedicated to one of the most interesting and debatable phenomena in the history of ancient Greece - early Greek tyranny (VII - 1st half ... Category:

The archaic period is the time of the most intensive development of ancient society, when it acquires certain specifics in comparison with other slave-owning societies. It was then that classical slavery, the polis as the main form of political organization, and the democratic form of government were formed. Ethnic self-consciousness is being developed: the Greeks begin to realize themselves as a single people. Concepts are bornHellenes, Hellas - on the one hand, andbarbarians - with another. At the same time, the foundations of ancient culture were laid.

The era of archaic - the time of the formation of the Greekarchitecture , whose main achievements are associated with the construction of temples. Greek temples were the centers of social and business life of the policy. They were originally built onacropolises - fortified hills of the city, later began to be built on the main city squares. Unlike Christian temples, ancient Greek sanctuaries were not intended for the gathering of believers. The people during the cult actions remained outside the temple, seeing it only from the outside. This caused special attention to the external appearance of the building.

The main type of ancient Greek temple -peripter (“feathered”), a rectangular temple, surrounded on all sides by a colonnade. Already in the early buildings, the desire for harmony, proportionality of all elements of the architectural whole is clearly expressed. The construction of the temple was subject to certain rules that ensured the balance of the parts of the structure. This is how the Greek architecturalorder (from Latin "order"-" order") - a system of proportional relationship between the bearing and carried parts of the building. Order knowledge has a stepped base, a number of vertical supports - columns (bearing elements) and a beam ceiling -entablature (carrying part).

In the era of the archaic, the order developed in two versions - Doric and Ionic.Doric the style is more masculine, simple and powerful,Ionic smarter, lighter and more elegant. The Doric column is heavy, slightly thickened below the middle. The top of the columncapital - consists of two stone slabs, round lower and square upper. Subsequently, the columns of Doric temples were often replaced by male figures (atlantes).

Compared to the Doric, the Ionic column is more slender and elegant. She has a basisbase , the capital is decorated with two graceful curls -volutes . Cornice - a horizontal ledge on the wall supporting the roof of the building - richly decorated.

In the Hellenistic era, when architecture began to strive for greater splendor,Corinthian style lavishly decorated with floral motifs.

In the archaic era, many temples of the Doric and Ionic styles were erected in various Greek cities. The buildings of the Doric oredar are the temples of Hera and Olympia, Apollo in Corinth, Demeter in Poseidonia (2nd half of the 6th century BC). Ionic temples - Artemis in Ephesus, Hera on the island of Samos. All ancient Greek temples were covered with multi-color paintings, shining in the sun with many colors.

In the archaic period, there ismonumental sculpture - a new art form, previously unknown to Greece. The most typical examples of archaic monumental sculpture werekouros and bark. Kouros - a statue of a naked young athlete, bark - a statue of a slender girl in long robes. Both mere mortals and gods were depicted in this way, while not an individualized, but a generalized image was created. In male figures, athletic build, strength, courage were emphasized, in female figures - noble restraint and gentleness. All kouros and kora stand straight, arms tightly pressed to the body. The eyes are wide open, the corners of the lips are slightly raised (the so-called "archaic smile").

In the era of archaism, the art of artists who were engaged inpainted clay vases. These drawings were executed in various techniques, for example, black-figure or red-figure. ATblack-figure vases on a reddish background of clay, a pattern was applied, made with thick black varnish. ATred-figure On the contrary, the background was covered with black varnish, while the figures retained the natural color of the clay, which made it possible to draw the forms in more detail. Masters with the help of lines outlined the folds of clothing, muscles, facial features. The content of the paintings is usually associated with mythology, the Homeric epic, with the depiction of everyday scenes.

The most significant masters of black-figure vase painting wereclitius and Exekius (among his most famous works is an amphora depicting Achilles and Ajax playing dice). The largest representative of the red-figure style wasEuphronius .

The shapes of the vessels are as varied as their functions: amphorae and craters were used to store and mix wine with water, kiliks and rhytons were intended for drinking, lekythos served for cult purposes, and so on.

The main achievement of the archaic era in the field of literature was the creationlyric poetry (7th century BC), which replaced the heroic epic. For the first time in the history of ancient culture, poetry spoke about the personal experiences of a person.

Term lyrics associated with the lyre: the ancient Greek poets did not just read, but sang their poems, accompanying themselves on the lyre or cithara. This is probably why the lyre has become a symbol of poetry and musical art. Another name for poetry performed to musical accompaniment ismelika , from the Greek word "melos"- song, melody.

The island of Lesbos became the center of the lyrics. Here, their own music and poetry studios arose early, where people came to study from different areas of the Hellenic world. One of these schools, for noble girls, was headed bySappho (Sappho), who lived in the 6th century BC. - a brilliantly gifted poetess of antiquity, smart, beautiful in appearance. Her work can be considered a classic example of the poetry of love.

Another remarkable representative of the musical and poetic school of Lesvos wasAlcay , a contemporary of Sappho. The favorite themes of his work are the political struggle, exile, feast, love.

The glory of ancient lyrics was also composed of worksArchilochus , who, instead of hexameter, introduced new poetic meters (iambic, trocheus) into literature,Anacreon - singer of worldly pleasures,Tirtea , which has become a symbol of poetry that inspires warriors to battle,Pindara - the creator of solemn hymns in honor of his native fatherland, winners of pan-Greek sports games.

The greatest cultural achievements of the Greek archaic also include the birth of drama, which became a synthesis of previously established genres of literature, and the emergence of the "science of all sciences" - philosophy. Finally, the creation of alphabetic writing is connected with the archaic era: having supplemented and transformed the Phoenician syllabic system, the Greeks invented an accessible way of fixing information for everyone, which formed the basis of European alphabets.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION OF THE MOSCOW REGION

MOSCOW STATE REGIONAL UNIVERSITY

Historical and Philological Institute

FACULTY OF HISTORY, POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LAW

Department of the History of the Ancient World and the Middle Ages

Coursework on the topic:

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

Completed by: Klimenko I.E.

2nd year student d/o

Scientific adviser:

Ph.D., Assoc. A.S. Klemeshov

Moscow 2014

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

Writing………………………………………………………….. 7

Poetry……………………………………………………………………… 7

Religion and Philosophy…………………………………………………. ten

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

Vase painting………………………………………………………15

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

Olympic Games………………………………………………………18

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

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

Theater………………………………………………………………………23

Coins…………………………………………………………………..24

Conclusion

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 initially 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, which followed the "dark ages", a significant expansion of political theory began, the rise of democracy, philosophy, theater, poetry, the revival of written language (the appearance of the Greek alphabet to replace the forgotten one 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 for the future amazing rise and prosperity were made. Profound changes are taking place in almost every area of ​​life. For three centuries, ancient society made the transition from the village to the 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 of public life. Society, as it were, tries all possible forms of government and government (ie, 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 crafts in the country. Since this does not solve the "employment problem", the colonization of neighboring and distant lands, which began back in the Achaean period, is intensifying, as a result of which Greece is growing territorially to enormous proportions. An economic leap contributes to an increase in the market and trade operations, in which the main support is money circulation system. Appeared coinage, which accelerated these processes.

There have been great achievements and victories in the development of spiritual culture. In its development, an absolute role was played by the emergence alphabetic writing, which became the main achievement of the culture of archaic Greece. It was made on the basis of the Phoenician script 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 ethics and values ancient society, in which the main thing is a sense of collectivism will be combined with an agonistic (competitive) beginning, with the formation of the rights of the individual and the individual, the spirit of freedom. A special role is occupied by patriotism and citizenship. The protection of one's policy began to be considered as the highest honor of a citizen. At the same time, a symbol of a person is also born, in which the spirit and body are in harmony.

The embodiment 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 five days, during which the "sacred peace" was observed, stopping all hostilities. The one who took 1st place at the games enjoyed great success and received significant social guarantees (tax exemption, lifelong pension, permanent places in the theater and on holidays). The winner of the games three times ordered his statue from a famous sculptor and placed it in a sacred grove that surrounded the main shrine of the city of Olympia and all of Greece - the temple of Zeus.

In the archaic era, such symbols of ancient culture arose as philosophy and spider. Their father was Thales her, in 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, in whom science, which takes the form mathematics, represents a completely independent value.

The real flourishing in this era occurs in poetry. The greatest monuments of ancient literature were the epic poems of Homer "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 "Catalogue 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 sang of 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 era of the archaic. At this time it develops architecture, standing on two types of orders - Doric and Ionic. The leading type of construction is the sacred temple as the abode of God. The most famous and revered is the temple of Apollo at Delphi. There is also monumental sculpture - first wooden, and then stone. Two types are most popular: a naked male statue, known as a “kouros” (figure of a young athlete), and a draped female one, an example of which was a bark (upright girl).

The main elements of the urban structure of the archaic period were the acropolis (sanctuary) and the agora (shopping center), around were residential quarters 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. - from marble. An architectural order is being created in its Doric and Ionic variants. The stern, 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, it itself is much more elegant than the Doric column. Among the buildings of the Doric order, the temple of Hera at Olympia was especially famous, and the Ionic order was the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

During the archaic period, there is a synthesis of architecture and sculpture - temples are decorated with reliefs on the outside, 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 of the archaic era surprises with its richness and variety of forms, the beauty of style. Corinthian vases, painted in the so-called orientalizing, i.e. Oriental style, which is distinguished by the beauty and whimsy of the picturesque 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 - bark. The faces of the sculptures were given individuality (“Cleobis and Biton” by Polymedes), the poses were given static, tense consistency, nobility and majesty. In the VI century. BC. temple decorations. The motives for the created compositions were traditional, artistically modified myths, historical events described by Homer and their participants. Hue played an important role in sculpture. Individual body parts of the kuros and clothing were painted. Sometimes precious stones were inserted into the eye sockets. In a vase painting in the 6th century. BC. the black-figure style (founder Exekius) is known - black lacquer 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 lacquer. The approach to the second style had artists turning to dissimilar everyday subjects (“Girl heading to the bathhouse” from the masterful Euphronius

Religion. The Greek religion continued to play a unifying role in society. An important meaning was played by the image of Apollo in Delphi. This cult of the Delphic Sacred College in the Greek state was very great, but it was purely cult in nature, since the priests did not participate in government. In policies, elected priests were in charge of sacraments and rituals, while at the same time carrying out religious enlightenment of 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 archaism, what archaism 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.

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. During these three centuries, t. in a relatively short historical period, Greece far outstripped its neighboring countries in its development, including the countries of the ancient East, which until that time had been at the forefront of the cultural progress of mankind.

The archaic period was the time of the 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 art forms are being revived: architecture, monumental sculpture, painting. Colonnades of the first Greek temples are erected from marble and limestone. Statues are carved from stone and cast in bronze. The poems of Homer and Hesiod appear, the lyrical verses of Archilochus and Saffo, amazing in depth and sincerity of feeling. Alcaeus and many other poets. The first philosophers - Thales. Anaximenes. Anaximander - intensely reflect on the question of the origin of the universe and the fundamental principle of all things.

The rapid growth of Greek culture during the VIII - VI 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. So, the Phoenicians borrowed an alphabetic letter, which the Greeks improved by introducing the designation not only of consonants, but also of vowels; this is where modern alphabets, including Russian, originate. From Phoenicia or from Syria, the secret of making glass from sand came to Greece, as well as a method for extracting purple dye from the shells of sea mollusks. The Egyptians and Babylonians became the Greeks' teachers in astronomy and geometry. Egyptian architecture and monumental sculpture had a strong influence on the emerging Greek art. The Greeks adopted such an important invention as coinage from the Lydians.

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

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

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

Southern and Central Italy, even to Syria and Egypt - and gradually conquers these countries. The colonies are gradually turning into important centers of intermediary trade between the countries of the ancient world. In Greece itself, the main centers of economic activity are policies that are at the head of the colonization movement. Among them are the cities of the island 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 craftsmen persistently improve the technical equipment of their workshops. In the entire subsequent history of the ancient world, there have never been so many discoveries and inventions as in the three centuries that make up the archaic period. Suffice it to point to such important innovations as the discovery of a method for soldering iron or bronze casting. Greek vases of the 7th-6th centuries. BC e. amaze with the richness and variety of forms, the beauty of the picturesque design. Among them are the vessels made by the Corinthian masters, painted in the so-called orientalizing, i.e. "oriental" style (it is distinguished by the colorfulness and fantastic quirkiness of the picturesque decor, reminiscent of drawings on oriental carpets), and later vases of the black-figure style, mainly Athenian and Peloponnesian production. The products of the Greek ceramists and bronze casters testify to the high professionalism and the far advanced division of labor not only between branches, but also within individual branches of handicraft production. The bulk of the ceramics exported from Greece to foreign markets was made in special workshops by skilled potters and vase painters. Specialist artisans were no longer, as they once were, disenfranchised 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 rather influential social stratum. This is indicated not only by the quantitative and qualitative growth of handicraft products, but also by the appearance in the most economically developed policies of special handicraft quarters, 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 VI century. BC e. All these facts indicate that during the archaic period in Greece there was a historical shift of great importance: handicrafts finally separated from agriculture as a separate, completely independent branch of commodity production. Accordingly, agriculture is also being restructured, which can now focus not only on the internal needs of the family community, but also on market demand. Communication with the market becomes a matter 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 (land roads in mountainous Greece were extremely inconvenient and unsafe due to robbers). In a number of regions of Greece, peasants are moving from growing 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 grain 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 subsistence 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 monetary standards appear, imitating the Lydian. Even before that, in many regions of Greece, small metal (sometimes copper, sometimes iron) bars, called obols (literally, “knitting needles”, “spit”), were used as the main unit of exchange. Six obols made up a drachma (literally, "a handful"), since such a number could be captured with one hand. Now these ancient names have been 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 - Aegina and Euboean. In addition to the island of Euboea, the Euboean standard was also adopted in Corinth, Athens (since the beginning of the 6th century) and in many Western Greek colonies, in other places they used Aegina. Both systems of coinage were based on a weight unit called talent (Talant as a weight unit was borrowed from Western Asia; Babylonian talent (biltu, about 30 kg) of 60 min, or 360 shekels, and Phoenician talent (kikkar , about 26 kg, which is equal to the Euboean talent) from 60 min, or 360 shekels. The Aegypian talent weighed 37 kg. - Note 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 hastened the process of property stratification of the community, which began even before their appearance, and brought the complete and final triumph of private property even closer.

Purchase and sale transactions now apply to all types of material values. 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: they are sold, mortgaged, transferred by will or as a dowry. The already mentioned Hesiod advises his reader to seek the favor of the gods with regular sacrifices, “so that,” he finishes his instruction, “you buy the plots of others, and not yours would be others.”

Money itself is sold and bought. A rich person could lend them to a poor man at a percentage, according to our concepts, 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 is an indicator an increase in the marketability of farms and, consequently, a certain decrease in their dependence on usurious credit, the dominance of which in Greece turned out to be short-lived. - Note ed.). Along with usury came debt slavery. Self-mortgage deals are becoming commonplace. Unable to pay his creditor in time, the debtor pledges his children, his wife, and then himself. If the debt and the interest accumulated on it were not paid even after that, the debtor with all his family and the remnants of property fell into bondage to the usurer and turned into a slave, whose position was no different from that 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 exhausted the internal forces of the polis community, undermined its combat capability in the fight against external enemies. In many states, special laws were passed that prohibited or limited the enslavement of citizens. An example is the famous Solonian seisakhteia (“shaking off the burden”) in Athens (see below about it). However, purely legislative measures would hardly have succeeded in eradicating this terrible social evil if the slaves of their fellow tribesmen had not found a replacement in the person of foreign slaves. The widespread distribution of this new and for that time, of course, more progressive form of slavery was directly connected with colonization. In those days, the Greeks did not yet wage large wars with neighboring peoples. The bulk of the slaves entered the Greek markets from the colonies, where they could be purchased in large quantities and at affordable prices from local kings. Slaves were one of the main items of Scythian and Thracian exports to Greece, they were exported in masses from Asia Minor, Italy, Sicily and other areas of the colonial periphery.

The surplus of cheap labor in the markets of the Greek cities made possible for the first time the widespread use of slave labor in all the main branches of production. Purchased slaves now appear not only in the homes of the nobility, but also in the households 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, in mining. Everywhere they performed the most difficult and humiliating work that did not require special training. Thanks to this, their owners, the citizens of the polis, created an excess of free time, which they could devote to politics, sports, art, philosophy, etc. This was how the foundations of a new slave-owning society and, at the same time, a new polis civilization, sharply different from the previous one, were laid in Greece. her palace civilization of the Cretan-Mycenaean era. The first and most important sign of the transition of Greek society from barbarism to civilization was the formation of cities. It was precisely in the archaic era that the city for the first time truly separated from the village both politically and economically subjugated it to itself. This event was associated with the separation of crafts from agriculture and the development of commodity and child relations (However, the Greeks themselves saw the main sign of the city not from trade and craft activities, but in the political independence of the settlement, its independence from other communities. In their understanding of cities (policies ) could also be considered unfortified settlements that had independence for reasons of a military-political nature.).

Almost all Greek cities, with the exception of the colonies, grew out of the fortified settlements of the Homeric era - policies, retaining this ancient name. There was, however, one very significant difference between the Homeric polis and the archaic polis that replaced it. The Homeric policy was at the same time both a city and a village, since no other settlements competing with it existed on the territory subject to it. 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 polis and politically dependent on it.

It should also be taken into account that, in comparison with the Homeric time, the Greek city-states of the archaic period became larger. This consolidation took place 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 in Greek Sinoikism, t. "joint settlement", resorted to many communities in order to strengthen their defenses in the face of hostile neighbors. There were no big cities in the modern sense of the word in Greece. Policies 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, dug out by archaeologists; part of it was on a peninsula that closed the entrance to a deep bay - a convenient ship parking. The city center was surrounded by a defensive brick wall on a stone dole. There were several gates with towers and observation platforms in the wall. The city had a regular layout: the rows of houses were strictly parallel to each other. There were several churches in the city. The houses were quite roomy and comfortable, some of them even found 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, here in the community of other citizens of the policy he was engaged in politics - he decided state affairs; here, in the agora, he could learn all the important news of the city. Originally, the agora was just an open area, devoid of any buildings. Later, they began to arrange wooden or stone seats on the pei, which rose in steps one above the other. The people were seated on these benches during meetings. At an even later time (already at the end of the archaic period), special canopies were erected on the sides of the square - porticos that protected people from the rays of the sun. Porticos have become a favorite haunt of petty merchants, philosophers and all the loitering public. Directly on the agora or not far from it, the government buildings of the policy were located: bouleuterium - the building of the city council (bule), pritaney - a place for meetings of the ruling college of pritans, dicasteries - the court building, etc. New laws and orders were exhibited on the agora for public familiarization government.

Among the buildings of the archaic city, the temples of the main Olympian gods and famous heroes were noticeably distinguished by their size and splendor of decoration. Separate 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 it was present in it in the form of its image.

Initially, it was just a crude wooden idol, which had a very remote 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 by them from marble or cast in bronze could well pass for living people (the Greeks imagined their gods as humanoid beings endowed with the gift of immortality and superhuman power). On holidays, the god, dressed in his best clothes (for such cases, each temple had a special wardrobe), crowned with a golden wreath, graciously accepted gifts and sacrifices from the citizens of the policy, who came to the temple in a solemn procession. Before approaching the shrine, the procession passed through the city to the sound of flutes with garlands of fresh flowers and lit torches, accompanied by an armed escort. Festivities in honor of the deity of the given policy 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 god-"city holder" was usually located in the city citadel, which the Greeks called the acropolis, that is, the "upper city". The state ka:sha of the policy was kept here. Fines levied for various crimes and all other types of state revenues came here), In Athens already in the VI 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 well known how much space athletic competitions occupied in the life of the ancient Greeks. Since ancient times, special areas for young people to exercise were arranged in Greek cities - they were called gymnasiums. and palestras. Boys and teenagers spent whole days there, regardless of the season, diligently practicing god, wrestling, fisticuffs, jumping, throwing a spear and discus. Not a single big holiday was complete without a mass athletic competition - agona, in which all free-born citizens of the policy, as well as specially invited foreigners, could take part.

Some agons, which were especially popular, turned into interpolis pan-Greek festivals. Such are the famous Olympic Games, which every four years attracted athletes and "fans" from all over the Greek world, including even the most remote colonies. 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 city. Grateful fellow citizens showered the Olympionic winner with truly royal honors (sometimes they even dismantled the city wall to clear the way for the victor's triumphal chariot: it was believed that a person of such rank could not pass through an ordinary gate).

These are the main 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, verbal disputes in the popular 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 could not imagine a normal human life outside the city walls. Only such a way of life they considered worthy of a free man - a real Hellenic, and in this special way of life they saw their main thing different from all the surrounding "barbarian" peoples.

Spawned 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 the most diverse 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 a class hierarchy that separates all people on the “best”, or “noble”, and “worst”, or “low-born”, and the principle of strict isolation of individual tribal unions both from each other and from the entire outside world. In the cities, which had already begun earlier, in connection with the resettlement in the colonies, the process of breaking down inter-clan barriers went especially fast. People who belonged to different clans, phyla and phratries now not only live side by side, in the same quarters, but also enter into business and simply friendly contacts, enter into marriage alliances. Gradually, the line separating the ancient tribal nobility from wealthy merchants and landowners who came out of the common people begins to blur. These two strata 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 all. Wealth has mixed the breeds,” exclaims the Megarian poet of the 6th century. Theognis.

With the growth of cities is associated progress in the field of domestic and international law. The need for further development of commodity-money relations, uniting the entire population of the policy into a single civil collective was difficult to reconcile with the traditional principles of tribal law and morality, according to which every stranger - a native of a foreign clan or phratry was perceived as a potential enemy, subject to destruction or transformation into slave. In the archaic era, these views are gradually beginning to give way to broader and more humane views, according to which there is some kind of divine justice that applies equally to all people, regardless of their tribal or tribal affiliation. We encounter such an idea already in the Works and Days of Hesiod, a Boeotian poet of the 8th century. BC e., although it is completely alien to his closest predecessor, Homer. The gods, in the understanding of Hesiod, closely monitor the right and wrong deeds of people. For this purpose, “three myriad guardians of the immortals ... spies of right and evil human deeds were sent to earth;

The main guardian of law is the daughter of Zeus - the goddess Dike ("Justice"). The real progress of public legal consciousness is evidenced by the oldest collections of laws attributed to famous legislators: Draco, Zalevka, Charond, etc. Judging by the surviving fragments, these codes were still very imperfect and contained many archaic legal norms and customs: similar to them were a record of customary law that already existed. Many of these laws have their roots in the depths of the primitive era, such as the exotic custom of bringing to justice “murderers” of animals and inanimate objects, which we encounter in one of the extant fragments from the laws of Draco. At the same time, the very fact of recording the right cannot but be assessed as a positive development, since it testifies to the desire to put an end to the arbitrariness of influential families and clans and to achieve the subordination of the clan to the judicial authority of the policy. Recording, laws and the introduction of proper legal proceedings contributed to the eradication of such ancient customs as blood feuds or bribes for murder. Now the murder is no longer considered a private affair of two families: the family of the killer and the family of his victim. The entire community, represented by its judiciary, participates in resolving the dispute.

Advanced norms of morality and law apply in this era not only to compatriots, but also to foreigners, citizens of other policies. The corpse of a slain enemy was no longer abused (cf., for example, the Iliad, where Achilles abused the body of the deceased Hector), but was handed over to relatives for burial. Free Hellenes captured in the 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. Separate policies conclude agreements between themselves, guaranteeing the personal safety and inviolability of the property of citizens if they find themselves in 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 a common Greek, or, as they said then, pan-Hellenic, patriotism. However, things did not go beyond these first attempts. The Greeks still did not become a single people.

It was the cities that were the main centers of achievements of advanced culture in the archaic period. A new writing system, the alphabet, has become 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 is becoming the common property of all citizens of the policy (everyone could master the elementary skills of writing and reading in elementary school). The new writing system for the first time was a truly universal means of transmitting information, which could be used with equal success in business correspondence, and for recording lyrical poems or philosophical aphorisms. All this led to the rapid growth of literacy among the population of the Greek policies and, undoubtedly, contributed to the further progress of culture in all its main areas.

However, all this progress, as is usually the case in history, had its reverse, shadow 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 ceased, but, on the contrary, began to rage with even greater force. Almost everywhere in Greece we see the same bleak picture: the masses of the peasants are ruined, deprived of their "father's allotments" and join the ranks of farm laborers - fetes. Describing the situation that developed in Athens at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC e., before the reforms of Solon, Aristotle wrote: “It must be borne in mind that in general the state 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 six-dollars, because on such lease terms they cultivated the fields of the rich (It’s not clear what Aristotle wanted to say with this phrase. The six-dollars could give the landowner either 5/6 or 1/6 of the crop. The latter seems more likely, since with the existing agricultural technique, it is unlikely that a peasant could feed his family with one sixth of the harvest from a plot of such a size that he could cultivate with his wife and children.). All the land in general was in the hands of a few. At the same time, if these poor people did not pay rent, they could be taken into bondage both themselves and their children. Yes, and loans from all were secured by personal bondage until the time of Solon. In one way or another, this characteristic is applicable to all other regions of the then Greece.

The radical breaking of the habitual 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 whole 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: gold, silver, copper and the generation of heroes. Each of them lived worse than the previous one, but the most difficult fate went to the fifth, iron generation of people, to which Hesiod himself considers himself. “If I could not live with the generation of the fifth century! - the poet exclaims sadly. - Before he died, I would like to be born later.

The consciousness of one's helplessness in the face of the "kings-givers" ("Kings" (basilei) in the Lord, as well as in Homer, are representatives of the local tribal nobility, standing at the head of the community.), apparently, especially oppressed the poet-peasants and on the. This is evidenced by the Fable of the Nightingale and the Hawk included in Hesiod's poem:

Now I will tell a fable to the kings, how foolish they are. That's what a hawk once said to a nightingale. Claws stuck into him and carrying him in high clouds. The nightingale squeaked pitifully, pierced by crooked claws, The same authoritatively addressed him with such a speech: “What are you, unfortunate, squeaking? After all, I am much stronger than you! No matter how you sing, I'll take you wherever I want, And I can dine with you, and set you free. He has no reason who wants to measure himself with the strongest; No matter how he defeats him, he will only add to grief! 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 tribal nobility in most Greek cities was still unshakable.

Some hundred years later, 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 our eyes and, like Hesiod, is inclined to be very pessimistic about his era. He is tormented by the consciousness of the irreversibility of the social changes taking place around him:

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

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

And behind the city wall grazed like a wild deer.

He became famous from now on.

And the people who were noble,

Became low. Well, who could endure all this?

Theognid'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 fortune in various commercial enterprises and speculations, but, having insufficient practical wisdom, went bankrupt, giving way to more tenacious and resourceful people from the bottom, 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 with a firm foot on the chest of the vain rabble, Beat it with a brass bosom, bend your neck under the yoke!

Reality, however, shatters these illusions of the herald of aristocratic reaction. Returning back is already impossible, and the poet is aware of this.

Theognid's poems capture the height of the class struggle, the moment when the mutual enmity and hatred of the fighting parties reached their highest point. A powerful democratic movement at that time swept the cities of the Northern Peloponnese, including the native city of Theognis Megara, also Attica, the island policies 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 policy before the law") (isonomy), "Transfer of power to the people" (democracy). This democratic movement was heterogeneous in its social composition. It was attended by rich merchants from the common people, and wealthy peasants, and artisans, and the destitute masses of the rural and urban poor. If the former sought, above all, political equality with the ancient nobility, then the latter were much more attracted by the idea of ​​universal property equality, which meant, in those conditions, a return back to the traditions of the communal tribal system, to regular redistribution of land. In many places, desperate peasants tried to put into practice Hesiod's patriarchal utopia and bring humanity back to the "golden age". Inspired by this idea, they seized the property of the rich and the nobility and divided it among themselves, threw 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 pledge of payment of the debt and could be taken away in case of non-payment. ), burned the debt books of usurers. In protecting their property, the rich increasingly use terror and violence, and thus the class enmity that has accumulated over the centuries develops into a real civil war. Uprisings and coups d'etat, accompanied by brutal murders, mass expulsions and confiscation of the property of the vanquished, become at this time a common occurrence in the life of the Greek city-states. Theognis, in one of his elegies, warns the reader:

Let our city still rest in complete silence, - Believe me, she can reign in the city for a short time. Where bad people begin to strive for this, To benefit themselves from the passions of the people. 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, the 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 polis community could no longer resist the claims of influential persons to sole 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 (The word itself was borrowed by the Greeks from the Lydian language and initially did not have a swearing 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 went into exile, and their property passed into the treasury of the tyrant. In the later historical tradition, mostly hostile to tyranny, the very word "tyranny" became in Greek a synonym for merciless bloody arbitrariness. Most often, the victims of repression were people from old aristocratic families. The tip of the terrorist policy of the tyrants was directed against the tribal nobility. Not content with the physical extermination of the most prominent representatives of this social group, the tyrants infringed on its interests in every possible way, forbidding aristocrats to do gymnastics, gather for joint meals and drinking parties, acquire 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, assassination attempts, rebellions.

The relations of the tyrant with the people developed in a different way. Many tyrants of the archaic era began their political careers as prostates, that is, leaders and defenders of the demos. The famous Peisistratus, 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 “guard” of the tyrant, provided to Peisistratus at his request by the Athenian people, was a detachment of three hundred people armed with clubs - the usual weapon of the Greek peasantry in that troubled time. With the help of these "club-bearers" Peisistratus captured the Athenian acropolis and thus became the master of the situation in the city. While in power, the tyrant coaxed the demos with gifts, free meals and entertainment during the holidays. Thus, Peisistratus introduced cheap agricultural credit in Athens, lending implements, seeds, and livestock to needy peasants. He instituted two new national festivals; The Great Panathenaic and City Dionysius and celebrated them with extraordinary pomp (The program of the City Dionysius included theatrical performances. According to legend, in 536 BC, under Peisistratus, the first tragedy in the history of the Greek theater was staged.). The desire to achieve popularity among the people dictated the measures attributed to many tyrants for the improvement of cities: the construction of water pipes 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 the all-round strengthening of dominion over the policy and, in the future, the creation of 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 his part. In their "love of the people" tyrants usually did not go beyond insignificant handouts and demagogic promises to the crowd. None of the tyrants known to us tried to put into practice the main slogans of the democratic movement: "Redistribution of the land" and "Cancellation of debts." None of them did anything to democratize the political system of the policy. On the contrary, constantly in need of money to pay salaries to mercenaries, for their construction enterprises and other needs, tyrants levied previously unknown taxes on their subjects. So, under Pisistratus, the Athenians annually deducted 1/10 of their income to the treasury of the tyrant. On the whole, tyranny not only did not contribute to the further development of the slave-owning state, but, on the contrary, hindered it.

The tactics used by the tyrants in relation to the masses can be defined as "the policy of carrots and sticks."

Flirting with the demos and trying to win it over to their side as a possible ally in the fight against the nobility, tyrants at the same time were afraid of the people. In order to protect themselves from this side, they often resorted to disarming the citizens of the polis and at the same time surrounded themselves with hired bodyguards from among strangers or freed slaves. Any accumulation of people in a city street or square inspired suspicion in the tyrant; it seemed to him that the citizens were up to something, preparing a rebellion or an assassination attempt; the dwelling of the tyrant was usually located in the city citadel - on the acropolis. Only here, in his fortified nest, could he feel at least relatively safe.

Naturally, under such conditions, there was not and could not be a really 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, Peisistratus, Polycrates, and others - invariably attracted the attention of later Greek historians. From generation to generation, legends were passed on about their extraordinary power and wealth, about their superhuman luck, which aroused envy even among the gods themselves - such is the well-known legend about the Polycratic ring, preserved by Herodotus (Tradition says that visiting Polycrates, the tyrant 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 big fish as a gift, and the thrown ring was found in her belly.Egyptian king left Polycrates, considering him doomed, and soon he really died.). In an effort to give more brilliance to their reign and perpetuate their name, many tyrants attracted outstanding musicians, poets, and artists to their courts. Such Greek policies as Corinth, Sikyon, Athens, Samos, Miletus, became under the rule of tyrants rich, prosperous cities, adorned with new magnificent buildings. Some of the tyrants had a fairly successful foreign policy.

Periander, who ruled in 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 subjugated most of the island states of the Aegean Sea to his dominion. Peisistratus successfully fought for the mastery of the important sea route 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 may well rely on the sober and impartial assessment of tyranny, which was given by the greatest of Greek historians, Thucydides. “All the tyrants who were in the Hellenic states,” he wrote, “turned their concerns exclusively to their own interests, to the security of their person and to the exaltation of their home. Therefore, in governing the state, they were mainly concerned, as far as possible, with the adoption of measures for their own security; they did not accomplish a single remarkable deed, except perhaps for the wars of individual tyrants with border inhabitants. 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, such as 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 upheavals, 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 seized, but also to pass it on to their children (The longest was the rule of the Orphagorid dynasty in Sicyon (670-510 BC). the second place is occupied by the Corinthian Kypselides (657-583 BC), in the third place are the Peisistratids (560-510 BC)).

Tyranny only weakened the tribal nobility, but it could not completely break its power, and, probably, did not strive for this. In many cities, after the overthrow of tyrapia, outbreaks of acute struggle are again observed. But in the cycle of civil wars, a new type of state is gradually emerging - the slave-owning policy.

The formation of the policy was the result of the persistent transformational activity of many generations of Greek legislators. We know next to nothing about most of them. (The ancient tradition brought to us only a few names, among which the names of two prominent 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. A number of cases are known when Citizens of this or that state, driven to despair by endless strife and turmoil and not seeing any other way out of the situation that had arisen, elected one of their midst as a mediator and conciliator.

Solon was one of these conciliators. Elected in 594 BC e. to the position of the first archon (Archons (literally, "commanding") - the ruling board of officials, consisting of nine people. The first archon was considered the chairman of the board. The 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 transformations, the ultimate goal of which was to restore the unity of the polis community, split by civil strife into warring political groups. The most important among Solon's reforms was the radical reform of debt law, which went down in history under the figurative name of "shaking off the burden" (seisakhteya). Solon really threw off the hated burden of debt bondage from the shoulders of the Athenian people, declaring all debts and the interest accumulated on them invalid and forbidding self-mortgage transactions for the future. Seisakhteia saved the peasantry of Attica from enslavement and thus made possible the further development of democracies in Athens. Subsequently, the legislator himself proudly wrote about this merit to the Athenian people: What kind of I am from In whose name I

About that all the best I could say from Mother Black Earth, Pillars set

Slave before

(Translated by S. I. Radzig.).

did not fulfill those tasks, then rallied the people,

before Time, the court of the Olympians, the highest - from which I then removed a lot of debt,

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, his intention was not at all to “give an equal share in the wealth of relatives to the poor and noble,” that is, to completely equalize the nobility and the common people in property and social terms. Solon tried only to stop the further growth of large land ownership and thereby put an end to the dominance of the nobility in the economy of Athens. The law of Solon is known, which forbade the acquisition of land above a certain norm. Obviously, these measures were successful, since later, during the VI and V centuries. BC e., Attica remained predominantly a country of medium and small landownership, in which even the largest slaveholding farms exceeded several tens of hectares in area.

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

Cleisthenes in Athens was ruled 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 pillar of the aristocratic regime in Athens, as well as in all other Greek states, were clan associations - the so-called phyla and phratries. From ancient times, the entire Athenian demos was divided into four phyla, each of which included three phratries. At the head of each phratry was a noble family, who was in charge of its cult affairs. The rank and file of the phratry were obliged to submit to the religious and political authority of their "leaders", supporting them in all their undertakings.

Occupy a dominant position in tribal unions, the aristocracy kept under its control the entire mass of the demos. Against this political organization, Cleisphep directed his main blow. He introduced a new, purely territorial system of administrative division, distributing all citizens into ten phyla 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 divided, living in different territorial-administrative districts. Cleisthenes, in the words of Aristotle, "mixed the entire population of Attica", regardless of his traditional political and religious ties. In this way, he managed to simultaneously solve three important tasks: 1) the Athenian demos, and above all the peasantry, which constituted a very significant and at the same time the most conservative part of it, was freed from the ancient tribal traditions on which the political influence of the nobility was based; 2) the feuds that often arose between individual tribal unions, which threatened the internal unity of the Athenian state, were stopped; 3) those who had previously stood outside the phratries and phyla and, because of this, did not enjoy civil rights, were attracted to participate in political life. The reforms of Cleisthenes complete the first stage of the struggle for democracy in Athens. In the course of this struggle, the Athenian demos achieved great successes, grew politically and became stronger. The will of the demos, expressed by a general vote in the people's assembly (ekklesia), acquires the force of a binding law for all. All officials, not excluding the highest ones - archons and strategists (The strategists in Athens were the military leaders who commanded the army and navy. A board of ten strategists was established by Cleisthenes.), Are selected and are obliged to report to the people in their actions, and in that case, if any offense is committed on their part, they can be subjected to severe punishment.

Hand in hand with the people's assembly worked the Council of Five Hundred (boule) created by Cleisthenes and the jury court (helium) established by Solon. The Council of Five Hundred served as a kind of presidium at the national assembly, engaged in preliminary discussion and processing of all proposals and bills, which then came for final approval to the ecclesia. Therefore, the decrees of the people's assembly in Athens usually began with the formula: "The council and the people decided." As for the helium, it was the highest court in Athens, to which all citizens could complain about the unfair decisions of officials. Both the council and the jury were chosen by lot according to ten phyla established by Cleisthenes. Thanks to this, ordinary citizens could also get into their composition along with representatives of the nobility. In this they fundamentally differed from the old aristocratic council and court - the Areopagus.

However, the complete triumph of democratic ideals was still far away. The system of state administration that emerged as a result of the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes was assessed by the ancients as a moderate form of democracy. The stratum of the prosperous peasantry, which pushed into the background both the old landed nobility and the trade and craft strata of the urban population, enjoyed the greatest importance in the political life of Athens. Wealthy peasants - zevgits (3evgit - from the Greek zeugos - “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. - Note ed. .).) constituted the politically active core of the people's assembly. From them, a heavily armed hoplite was formed (Hoplite is a foot warrior with a full set of heavy protective weapons: armor, helmet and shield. Unlike the warriors of the Homeric era, the hoplites fought in close formation, the so-called phalanx.) militia, which is now becoming decisive force on the battlefields, almost completely displacing the aristocratic cavalry from them. The small-land peasants, as well as the urban poor, did not yet take an active part in the government of the state at that time, although formally those others were considered Athenian citizens. It should be borne in mind that, since the time of Solon, access to many of the government offices was limited in Athens by a high property qualification. Thus, only a person who belonged to the category of Zeugites, i.e., one who received from his land at least two hundred measures of annual income, could become a member of the council. The highest qualification was set for the position of archon - not less than five hundred measures of annual income. Representatives of the last, fourth category of feta (Feta - literally, "day laborers", "laborers." This category included citizens who received less than two hundred measures of annual income from the land, as well as those who had no land at all) were allowed only to the assembly of the people and to the jury. It took more than one decade of stubborn political struggle for the principle of civil equality to be consistently carried out 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 in Greece, many very diverse types and forms of polis organization arose. One of the most peculiar variants of the polis system developed in Sparta, the largest of the Dorian states of the Peloponnese. Starting from ancient times, the socio-economic development of Spartan society took a different direction than its usual. The Dorians who founded Sparta came to Laconia as conquerors and enslavers of the local Achaean population. Around the middle of the 8th century in Sparta, as in many other Greek states, an acute land hunger began to be felt. The problem of excess population that arose in connection with this required its immediate solution, and the Spartans solved it in their own way: they found a way out in expanding their territory at the expense of their nearest neighbors. The main object of Spartan aggression was Messenia, a rich and vast region in the southwestern part of the Peloponnese. The struggle for Messenia, which took place in the VIII-VII centuries. BC e., ended in the end with the complete conquest and enslavement of its population. The capture of fertile Messenian lands allowed the Spartan government to stop the impending agrarian crisis. In Sparta, a wide redistribution of land was carried out and a stable system of land tenure was created, based on a strict correspondence between the number of allotments and the number of full citizens. The whole land was divided into 9,000 plots of approximately equal profitability, which were distributed to the corresponding number of Spartans (Spartiates are the usual name for full-fledged citizens of Sparta in the sources.). In the future, the government of Sparta carefully monitored to ensure that the size of individual allotments remained unchanged all the time (they could not, for example, be split up when inherited), and they themselves could not pass from hand to hand through donation, will, sale, etc. e. The state helot slaves attached to the land from among the subjugated inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia were also divided. This was done in such a way that for each Spartan clerk (land plot) there were several carnal families who, with their labor, provided everything necessary for the owner of the clerk and his entire family.

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

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

The constant threat of carnal rebellion demanded maximum unity and organization of the Spartans. Therefore, simultaneously with the redistribution of land in Sparta, a whole series of reforms was carried out, which went down in history under the name of “laws / 1ikurga” (no reliable evidence has been preserved of the life and work of Lycurgus. It was not possible to establish with sufficient accuracy the time of his reforms. Many of modern historians believe It is most likely that the "Lycurgus system" in its final form took shape no earlier than by the end of the 7th - the beginning of the 6th century BC - Note ed.). These reforms in a short time beyond recognition changed the face of the Spartan state, 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 vigilant supervision of special officials (they were called zfors, that is, "guards"), 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 detail, 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 their sons as soon as they were seven years old to special camps - agels (literally, “herd”), where they were subjected to brutal drill, educating the younger generation in endurance, cunning, cruelty, the ability to order and obey and other qualities necessary for a "real Spartan". Adult Spartans, on a mandatory basis, attended joint meals - sissitia, monthly allocating a certain amount of products for their device. In the hands of the ruling elite of the Spartan state, sissitia and agels were a convenient means of controlling the behavior and moods of ordinary citizens. The state in Sparta actively intervened in the privacy of citizens, regulating childbearing and marital relations.

In accordance with the principle of the "Lycurgus system", all full-fledged citizens of Sparta were officially called "equal", and these were not empty words. In Sparta, for almost two centuries, a whole system of measures was in place 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 shells, long out of use outside Laconia. Trade and craft were considered in Sparta occupations that dishonor the citizen. They could only deal with the perieks, (literally, “living around”) - an inferior population of small towns scattered across the territory of Laconia and Messenia at some distance from Sparta itself. Almost all ways to accumulate wealth were closed to the citizens of this extraordinary state. However, even if one of them managed to make a fortune, he still could not use it under the vigilant supervision of the Spartan vice police. All Spartans, regardless of their origin and social status - no exceptions were made even for the “kings” who were at the head of the state (From ancient times, Sparta was ruled by two “kings” belonging to two different dynasties. The power of the “kings” was for life, according to it strongly limited the constant supervision of the ephors. The "kings" enjoyed full power only during the war as the supreme commanders of the Spartan army.) - lived in exactly the same conditions, like soldiers in the barracks, wore the same simple and coarse clothes, ate the same food for a common table in sissitia, used the same household utensils. A strict ban was imposed on the production and consumption of the most insignificant luxury goods in Sparta. Craftsmen from among the Perioeks produced only the simplest and most necessary utensils, tools and weapons for equipping the Spartan army. The import of foreign products into Sparta was strictly prohibited by law. The Spartan government managed to rally the citizens in the face of the enslaved, but constantly ready to revolt helots. Possessing a large margin of internal strength, the “community of equals” was able to withstand such serious tests in the future, such 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 stubborn military training, which the Spartans indulged in all their lives with unremitting zeal, also bore fruit. The famous Spartan phalanx (heavily armed infantry, kept in close formation) for a long time did not know its equal on the battlefields and deservedly enjoyed invincible fame. Sparta managed even before the beginning of the 5th century. BC e. to establish its hegemony over most of the Peloponnese, and subsequently tried to extend it also to the rest of Greece. However, the great-power claims of Sparta relied only on its military strength. Economically and culturally, it lagged far behind other Greek states. The establishment of the "Lycurgus 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 peculiar culture of archaic Sparta gradually waned, and then completely disappeared (Archaeological excavations on the territory of Sparta showed that in the 7th - significant centers of artistic crafts throughout Greece.The products of the lackey artisans of this time are not inferior to the best products of the Athenian, Corinthian and Euboean masters.). After Tyrtaeus, who sang the feats accomplished by the 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. Enclosed in itself, fenced off from the outside world by a blank wall of hostility and mistrust, Sparta is gradually becoming the main focus of political reaction in Greece, the hope and support of all enemies of democracy.

So, we got acquainted with the two extreme, most different forms of the early Greek policy. The first of these two forms, which developed in Athens as a result of the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes, ensured the harmonious development of the individual for citizens and turned out to be more capable of development and, therefore, historically more promising in comparison with the second - the Spartan barracks form of the policy. Athens did not know the complete political discrimination characteristic of Sparta of all people of manual labor. 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 of 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 policy. Any policy is a self-governing, or, as the Greeks said, an autonomous community, most often not going beyond the boundaries of one, usually a small city and its immediate environs (hence the translation of the term polis, generally accepted in modern scientific literature, is “city-state”). States exceeding in size this usual norm for the policy are found in Greece only as an exception (examples are just Athens and Sparta, on the territory of which, in addition to the main city that gave its name to the state, there were also other cities). The main feature of the polis organization, which distinguishes it from all other types of the slave-owning state, is that here all the members of the given community, and not just a selected part of them, participate in the government of the state to some extent, although, of course, far from being equal. , which is part of an extremely narrow circle of the court nobility, as we most often see it 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 over a very wide limits depending on the criteria of civil rights that 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-fledged citizens, then in Sparta their number even in the years of its highest rise power did not exceed 9-10 thousand people.However, in Greece there were also such policies in which the entire civil collection The tiv consisted of several hundred or even several dozen people.).

Even in the most conservative and politically backward Greek policies like Sparta, all full-fledged citizens had access to the popular 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). Eo the final phrase read: "Let the power and authority belong to the people."). Being an expression of the collective will of the citizens of the policy, the decisions of the people's assembly had the force of a universally binding law. This manifests 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. Above, we have already seen, using the example of Sparta, what paradoxical forms this omnipotence of the law sometimes took. And in other Greek states, the power of the collective over the person and property of an individual citizen, formalized as law, 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 which clay shards served as ballots. Hence the name of this procedure - ostracism, literally, "grafting". Each of the voting participants wrote on his shard the name of the person who, in his opinion, posed the greatest danger to the state at the moment. The one who collected such a marriage, the largest number of votes, was expelled from Athens for a period of ten years. The invention of ostracism was attributed to antiquity to Cleisthenes. Note that the institution of ostracism assumes universal literacy of citizens.). Using its right of supreme control over the life and behavior of individual citizens, the policy actively intervened in the economy, restraining the growth of private property and thus smoothing out property inequality within the civil community.

Examples of such intervention are the already known to us Solopov’s seisakhteia in Athens, 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 liturgies - duties in favor of the state, carried out 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 the slave-owning state, for example, over the 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 a private slave-owning economy. The polis community united in its composition both large and small owners, rich in land and slave owners, and simply free peasants and artisans, guaranteeing each of them the inviolability of the person and property and at the same time a certain minimum of rights, and above all the right to own land within the policy. . The Greeks saw legal capacity as the main feature that distinguishes a citizen from a non-citizen. At the same time, the policy was a military-political union of free owners, directed against all the 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 the slave-owning farms with the labor force they need.

The achievements of ancient Greek civilization formed the basis of European culture

Early Greece

The turn of the III-II millennium BC is the most important stage in the history of Europe. It was then that societies, divided into classes, arose in the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula and on the adjacent islands.

Around 2500 BC on many islands of the Aegean Sea and on the mainland, large metallurgical centers are being created. Significant progress is 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, technical and cultural innovations are spreading. Equally tangible was the progress in agriculture, associated with the creation of a new polycultural type (the so-called Mediterranean triad), which is based on the cultivation of cereals, primarily barley, grapes and olives. The proximity of the ancient civilizations of the Near East also had a great influence on the development of this region.

Painted vessel from the Old Palace in Phaistos. Around the 19th-18th centuries BC.

The initial stages of the formation of a class society and 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 the 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 the English scientists M. Ventris and J. Chadwick. But all texts are business reporting documents, and therefore the amount of information they report is limited. Certain information about society II millennium BC. preserved the famous poems of the Greeks "Iliad" and "Odyssey", as well as some myths. However, it is difficult to interpret these sources historically, since the reality in them is artistically transformed, the ideas and realities of different times are fused together and it is extremely difficult to isolate what indisputably belongs to the 2nd millennium BC.

According to some researchers, it is quite possible that the first centers of statehood appear on the Balkan Peninsula as early as the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. But the process of formation of a class society and statehood in the southern part of the Balkan region was interrupted by the invasion of tribes from the north. Around the 22nd century BC. here appeared the actual Greek tribes, calling themselves Achaeans or Danae. The old, pre-Greek population, whose ethnicity has not been established, was partially displaced or destroyed by the newcomers, partially assimilated. The conquerors stood at a lower level of development, and this circumstance affected a certain difference in the fate 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 originated in Crete is commonly referred to as the Minoan. This name was given to it by the English archaeologist A. Evans, who first discovered the monuments of this civilization during excavations of the palace at Knossos. The Greek mythological tradition considered Knossos the residence of King Minos, the powerful ruler of Crete and many other islands of the Aegean. Here, the Minotaur (half-man, half-bull) was born to Queen Pasiphae, for whom Daedalus built a labyrinth at Knossos.

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

At the turn of III and II millennium BC. the first states appear on Crete. Initially, there were four of them with centers-palaces in Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia, 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 covers approximately 600 years: from 2000 to 1400 BC. Around 1700 BC palaces were destroyed. According to some scientists, this was caused by natural disasters (most likely, a grandiose earthquake), others see it as the result of social conflicts, a consequence of the struggle of the masses. However, the catastrophe that broke out briefly delayed development. Soon, new ones appeared on the site of the destroyed palaces, surpassing the old ones in monumentality and luxury.

We know a little more about the era of the "new palaces". For example, the four palaces mentioned above, a number of settlements, and necropolises have been well studied. The palace of Knossos excavated by A. Evans is the best studied - a grandiose structure on a common platform (about 1 ha). Although only one floor has survived to our time, it is quite clear that the building was two-, and possibly three-story. 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 of them are made of 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 basement floor was occupied by pantries, which stored wine, olive oil, grain, local handicrafts, as well as goods coming from distant countries. The palace also housed craft workshops, where jewelers, potters, and vase painters worked.

The question of the social and political organization of the Cretan society is solved by scientists in different ways, but on the basis of the available data, it can be assumed that the palace economy was the basis of the economic life of the state. The Cretan society of the heyday was probably a theocracy: in one person the functions of king and high priest were combined. 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 unification of all Crete under the rule of the Knossos rulers takes place. 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 XV century. BC. catastrophe struck Crete, dealing a mortal blow to the Minoan civilization. Obviously, it happened because of the grandiose volcanic eruption on the island of Thira. Most of the settlements and palaces perished. Taking advantage of this, the Achaeans invaded the island from the Balkans. From the advanced center of the Mediterranean, Crete turns into a province of Achaean Greece.

Achaean civilization

The heyday of the civilization of Achaean Greece comes in the XV-XIII 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 an important role in the life of society. The most significant of them were discovered in Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Athens, Thebes, Orchomenus, 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, whose walls are made of huge limestone blocks, sometimes reaching 12 tons in weight. The thickness of the walls exceeded 4.5 m, while the height of only the surviving part was 7.5 m.

Like the Cretan palaces, the Achaean palaces have the same layout, but they are characterized by a clear symmetry. The Pylos Palace has been best studied by archaeologists. It was two-story and consisted of several dozen rooms: front rooms, sacral rooms, the chambers of the king and queen, their households: warehouses where they stored grain, wine, olive oil, household items; utility rooms. An important part of the palace was an 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 II millennium BC. present the results of excavations begun by Greek archaeologists in 1967 on the island of Thira, the southernmost of the Cyclades. Under a layer of volcanic ash, the remains of a city that died during a volcanic eruption were found here. The excavations uncovered cobbled streets, large buildings, of which the second and even third floors with stairs leading to them have been preserved. The paintings on the walls of buildings are striking: blue monkeys, stylized antelopes, two fighting boys, one of them has a special glove on his hand. Against the 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 how this blooming island looked before disaster struck. About the same houses they lived in, on what ships the then Tirenians sailed, can be judged by another painting, depicting, obviously, a panorama of the city and the sea with many ships.

Achaean economy

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

The owner of the land, as follows from the documents of 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 they were relatively few and belonged mainly to the palace. Slaves differed in their position, and there was no clear boundary between slaves and freemen. An important social group was formally free community members. They had their own plots of land, house, economy, but depended on the palace economically and politically. The ruling stratum included, first of all, a developed bureaucratic apparatus - central and local. At the head of the state was the king ("vanaka"), who had political and sacred functions.

Political events

The political history of Achaean Greece is poorly known. Some scholars write about a single Achaean state under the hegemony of Mycenae. However, it is more correct to consider 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 the Odyssey. It is possible that the Trojan War is one of the episodes of a broad 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 settled, 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 "sea peoples".

In the XIII century. BC. prosperous Achaean states began to feel the approach of formidable events. In many places, new fortifications are being erected and old fortifications are being repaired. As evidenced by archaeological excavations, the catastrophe broke out at the very end of the 13th century. BC. Almost all 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 XII century. BC. the last Achaean palace in Iolka perished. The population was partially destroyed, partially entrenched in areas unsuitable for habitation, or even emigrated from the country altogether.

Scientists have long been looking for the causes of these fatal events in the history of Greece. There are a number of hypotheses that explain the destruction of the Achaean civilization. The most convincing, in our opinion, is the following. At the end of the XIII century. BC. northern peoples moved to Greece, including the Dorian Greeks, as well as other tribes. Mass migration, however, did not occur then, and only later the Dorians gradually began to penetrate into the devastated territory. The old Achaean population survived only in some areas, for example, in Attica. The Achaeans, ousted from Greece, settled eastward, occupying the islands of the Aegean Sea, the western coast of Asia Minor and Cyprus.

Dark Ages of Greece

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XI-IX centuries BC. e. in the history of Greece, scientists call the dark ages. The main sources of this period are archaeological materials and epic poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey". The poems describe the campaign of the Achaeans near Troy, the capture of the city and the return home after many adventures of one of the heroes of the Trojan War - Odysseus. Thus, the main content of the poems should reflect the life of the Achaean society at the very end of its heyday. But Homer himself, apparently, lived already in the 8th century. BC. and many realities, life and relations of the past knew poorly. Moreover, he perceived the events of the past through the prism of his time. Finally, it is necessary to take into account the general features of the epic: hyperbolization, certain stereotypes in the stories about the heroes and their life, deliberate archaization.

During the described period, the main occupation of the population of Greece was still agriculture. Apparently, most of the cultivated land was occupied by cereals, horticulture and winemaking played an important role; olives continued to be one of the leading crops. Cattle breeding also developed. Judging by the poems of Homer, cattle acted as a "universal equivalent." So, in the Iliad, a large tripod is valued at twelve bulls, and a skilled craftswoman - at four bulls.

The origin of the foundations of Greek society

Important changes took place in handicraft production, primarily in metallurgy and metalworking. It was then that iron began 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 industrial cooperation of a number of families disappeared, and opportunities arose for the economic independence of the patriarchal family, the centralized production, storage and distribution of iron ceased to justify itself, 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 policy as a special form of the community. The citizens of the policy were the heads of the patriarchal families that were part of it. Each family represented an economically independent unit, which also determined their political equality. And although the emerging nobility sought to bring the community under their 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-communal relations.

Only such policies 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 tiny city-states-communities that united peasant farmers. It was a world where the main economic unit was the patriarchal family, economically self-sufficient and almost independent, with a simple way of life, the absence of external ties, 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. Under the primitive forms of social organization, there were still no forces capable of compelling the bulk of the producers to give away their surplus product. But this was precisely the economic potential of Greek society, which revealed itself in the next historical epoch 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 important discoveries were made that 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 slave-owning societies:

• classical slavery;
• system of money circulation and market;
• the main form of political organization is the policy;
• the concept of the sovereignty of the people and the democratic form of government.

At the same time, the main ethical norms and principles of morality, aesthetic ideals were developed, which had an impact on the ancient world throughout its history until the emergence of Christianity. Finally, during this period, the main phenomena of ancient culture were born:

• philosophy and science,
• major genres of literature
• theatre,
• order architecture,
• sport.

In order to more clearly imagine the dynamics of the development of society in the archaic period, we give the following comparison:

The dissolution of old traditional relationships and the emergence of new ones

The rapid rise prepared by the previous development, the spread of iron tools had manifold consequences for society. The increase in labor productivity in agriculture and handicrafts led to an increase in surplus product. An increasing number of people were released from the agricultural sector, which ensured the rapid growth of the craft. The separation of the agricultural and handicraft sectors of the economy led to a 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 - landed property, disintegrating traditional relationships.

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

The formation of the Greek aristocracy by modern researchers usually refers to the VIII century. BC e. The aristocracy of that time is a limited group of people, which is characterized by a special lifestyle and system of values ​​that are mandatory for its members. She occupied a dominant position in the sphere of public life, especially in the administration of justice, played a leading role in the war, since only noble warriors had heavy weapons, and therefore the battles were essentially duels of aristocrats. The aristocracy sought to completely put under its control the rank and file members of society, to turn them into an exploited mass. According to modern researchers, the attack of the aristocracy on ordinary fellow citizens began in the VIII century. BC e. Little is known about the details of this process, but its main results can be judged from the example of Athens, where the growing influence of the aristocracy led to the creation of a clearly defined estate structure, to a gradual reduction in the stratum of the free peasantry and an increase in the number of dependents.

"Great Greek Colonization"

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

For 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 east coast of Spain),
• northern (Thracian coast of the Aegean Sea, the region of the straits leading from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and its coast),
• southeast (the coast of North Africa and the Levant).

Modern researchers believe that its main incentive was the lack of land. Greece suffered both from absolute agrarian overpopulation (increase in population due to the general economic recovery) and from 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. Trade motives also took place: the desire of the Greeks to control trade routes.

Moskhofor ("carrying a calf"). Acropolis. Athens. Around 570 BC

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

Colonization had a huge impact on the development of ancient Greek society, especially in the economic sphere. The impossibility of establishing the necessary craft industries in the 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 colonies and the local population neighboring them began to receive Greek handicrafts, especially artistic ones, as well as some types of agricultural products (the best varieties of wines, olive oil, etc.). In return, the colonies supplied Greece with grain and other foodstuffs, as well as raw materials (wood, metal, etc.). As a result, the Greek craft received an impetus for further development, and agriculture began to acquire a commercial character. Thus, colonization muted the social conflicts in Greece, bringing the mass of the landless population out of its borders and at the same time contributing to the change in the social and economic structure of Greek society.

Change in the socio-political situation

The attack of the aristocracy on the rights of the demos reached its climax in the 7th century. BC, causing retaliatory resistance. In Greek society, a special social stratum of people appeared who amassed, 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 all. Wealth has mixed the breeds, ”the poet Theognid from Megara notes bitterly. This new layer greedily rushed to 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. About 675-600 years. BC. thanks to technological progress, a kind of revolution in military affairs is taking place. 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 be compared 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), relying on which it would be possible to exploit the peasantry. Even the peasants, who were dependent on the aristocrats, were not economically connected with the farms of the latter. All this predetermined the fragility of the rule of the nobility in society. Finally, the force that prevented the strengthening of the position of aristocrats was their ethics. It had an "atonal" (competitive) character: each aristocrat, in accordance with the ethical norms inherent in this layer, strove to be the first everywhere - on the battlefield, in sports, in politics. This system of values ​​was created by the nobility earlier and transferred to a new historical period, when, in order to ensure domination, it needed the rallying of all forces. However, the aristocracy could not achieve this.

Rise of tyranny

Aggravation 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 inconsistency. The overthrow of the rule of the nobility and the struggle against it were impossible without the support of the masses. The peasantry, which benefited from this policy, initially supported the tyrants, but as the threat posed by the aristocracy weakened, 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 had become large trade and craft centers back in the archaic era. The process of the formation of the classical polis, due to the relative abundance of sources, is best known to us from the example of Athens.

Athens variant

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 here to the nobility - Eupatrides, who gradually turned ordinary citizens into a dependent mass. This process is already in the VII century. BC. led to outbreaks of social conflict.

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

Solon's reforms, despite their radical nature, by no means solved all the problems. The aggravation of the social struggle in Athens led in 560 BC. to the establishment of the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons, which lasted here intermittently until 510 BC. Peisistrat pursued an active foreign policy, strengthening the position of Athens on the sea trade routes. Crafts flourished in the city, trade developed, and large-scale construction was carried out. Athens turned into one of the largest economic centers of Hellas. Under the successors of Pisistratus, this regime fell, which again caused an aggravation of social contradictions. Shortly after 509 BC. e. under the leadership of Cleisthenes, a new series of reforms is being carried out that finally approved the democratic system. The most important of them is the reform of the suffrage: henceforth, all citizens, regardless of their property status, had equal political rights. The system of territorial division was changed, destroying the influence of aristocrats in the field.

Sparta variant

Sparta gives a different development option. Having captured Lakonika and enslaved the local population, the Doryans already in the 9th century. BC. created a state in Sparta. Born very early as a result of the conquest, it retained many primitive features in its structure. In the future, the Spartans, during two wars, sought to conquer Messenia, a region in the west of the Peloponnese. The internal social conflict between the nobility and ordinary citizenship, which was already brewing earlier, broke out in Sparta during the Second Messenian War. In its main features, it resembled the conflicts that existed around the same time in other parts of Greece. A long struggle between ordinary Spartans and the aristocracy led to the reorganization of Spartan society. A system is being created, which at a later time was called Likurgov, after the name of the legislator who allegedly established it. Of course, tradition simplifies the picture, because this system was not created immediately, but took shape gradually. Having overcome the internal crisis, Sparta was able to conquer Messenia and turned into the most powerful state of the Peloponnese and, perhaps, all of Greece.

All land in Laconica and Messenia was divided into equal plots - cleres, which each Spartiate received in temporary possession, after his death the land was returned to the state. The desire for complete equality of the Spartans was also served by other measures:

• a harsh system of education aimed at the formation of an ideal warrior;
• the strictest regulation of all aspects of the life of citizens - the Spartans lived as if they were in a military camp;
• the prohibition to engage in agriculture, crafts and trade, to use gold and silver;
• limiting contact 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 (gerousia) and the people's assembly (apella), a new governing body appeared - a college of five ephors (guards). The ephorate was the highest control body, which ensured that no one deviated a single step from the principles of the Spartan system, which became the 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 some merit in this definition. The basis on which the "community of equals" was based, that is, the collective of equal and full-fledged Spartans, completely unemployed 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 regard helots as government slaves. Helots owned plots of land, tools, had economic independence, but they were obliged to transfer a certain share of the crop to their masters - the Spartans, ensuring their existence. According to modern researchers, this share was approximately 1/6-1/4 of the crop. 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 from the helots was severely punished.

In the Spartan policy, there was another social group - the perieks ("living around"), the descendants of the Dorians who were not part of the citizens of Sparta. They lived in communities, had internal self-government under the supervision of Spartan officials, were engaged in agriculture, crafts and trade. Perieki were obliged to put up military contingents. Similar social conditions and close to the Spartan system are known in Crete, in Argos, Thessaly and other areas.

Culture of the archaic era

ethnic identity

Like all other spheres of life, Greek culture in the archaic era experienced rapid changes. In these centuries, the development of ethnic identity took place, the Greeks gradually began to realize themselves as a single people, different from other peoples, whom they began to call barbarians. Ethnic self-consciousness found its manifestation in some social institutions. According to Greek tradition, starting from 776 BC. The Olympic Games began to be arranged, to which only Greeks were allowed.

Ethics

In the era of the archaic, the main features of the ethics of ancient Greek society take shape. Its distinctive feature was the combination of the emerging sense of collectivism and the agonistic (competitive) beginning. 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 in its essence, since the existence of an individual outside the polis was impossible. The development of this morality was also facilitated by the military organization of the policy (the formation of the phalanx). The highest valor of a citizen was to protect his policy: “It is sweet to lose life, among the warriors of the valiant fallen, to a brave husband in battle for the sake of his fatherland” - these words of the Spartan poet Tirteus perfectly expressed the mindset of the new era, characterizing the system of values ​​that prevailed then. However, the new morality retained the principles of Homeric morality with its leading principle of competitiveness. The nature of the political reforms in the policies determined the preservation of this morality, since it was not the aristocracy who was deprived of their 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 serve the policy better.

Religion

Religion also experienced a certain transformation. The formation of a single Greek world with all local features led to the creation of a common pantheon for all Greeks. Evidence of this is Hesiod's poem "Theogony". The cosmogonic ideas of the Greeks did not fundamentally differ from the ideas of many other peoples. It was believed that Chaos, the Earth (Gaia), the underworld (Tartarus) and Eros, the life principle, originally existed. Gaia gave birth to the starry sky - Uranus, which became the first ruler of the world and the spouse of Gaia. From Uranus and Gaia, the second generation of gods was born - the titans. 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, irrigating the earth and seas, Hades (Pluto) - the lord of the underworld. The wife of Zeus Hera was the patroness of marriage, Hestia was the goddess of the hearth. As the patroness of agriculture, Demeter was revered, whose daughter Cora, once abducted 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 volcanic fire hidden in the bowels of the earth, and also patronized artisans, especially blacksmiths. Among the descendants of Zeus, Apollo stood out - the god of the bright beginning in nature, often called Phoebus (Shining). According to myths, he defeated the dragon Python, and at the place where he performed his feat, and it was in Delphi, the Greeks erected a temple in honor of Apollo. This god was considered the patron of the arts, a healer god, but at the same time a deity that brings death, spreading epidemics; he later became the patron saint of colonization. The role of Apollo increases over time, and he begins to displace Zeus.

Apollo's sister Artemis is the goddess of the hunt and the patroness of youth. The many-sided functions of Hermes, originally the god of material wealth, then trade, the patron of deceivers and thieves, and finally, the patron of speakers and athletes; Hermes also led the souls of the dead to the underworld. Dionysus (or Bacchus) was revered as a deity of the productive forces of nature, viticulture and winemaking. Athena, who was born from the head of Zeus, enjoyed great honor - the goddess of wisdom, of any rational principle, but also of war (unlike Ares, who personified reckless courage). The constant companion of Athena 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 the Greek religious consciousness, especially at this stage of development, the idea of ​​the omnipotence of a deity is not characteristic; an impersonal force reigned over the world of the Olympic gods - Fate (Ananka). Due to political fragmentation and the absence of a priestly class, the Greeks did not develop a single religion. A large number of very close, but not identical, religious systems arose. As the polis worldview developed, ideas about the special connection of individual deities with one or another policy, the patrons of which 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 point of view of the Greek, there was no insurmountable line between the world of people and the world of gods, heroes acted as an intermediate link between them. Heroes such as Hercules, for their exploits, joined the world of the gods. The gods of the Greeks themselves were anthropomorphic, they experienced human passions and could suffer like people.

Architecture

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 are simple and primitive, all the forces of society are turned to monumental structures, primarily temples. Among them, the temples of the gods - the patrons of the community - excelled. The emerging sense of unity of the civil collective found its expression in the creation of such temples, which were considered the dwelling place of the gods. Early temples repeated the structure of the megaron of the 2nd millennium BC. A temple of a new type was born in Sparta, the ancient city of Hellas. A characteristic feature of Greek architecture is the use of orders, that is, a special construction system that emphasizes the architectonics of the building, gives expressiveness to the bearing and carried structural elements, revealing their function. The order building usually has a stepped base; a number of bearing vertical supports were placed on it - columns that supported the carried parts - an entablature that reflected the design of the beam ceiling and roof. Initially, temples were built on acropolises - fortified hills, ancient centers of settlements. Later, in connection with the general democratization of society, changes occur in the location of the temples. They are now erected in the lower city, most often on the agora - the main square, the former center of public and business life of the policy.

The role of temples in Greek society

The temple as an institution contributed to the development of various art forms. The custom of bringing gifts to the temple was established early on; part of the booty captured from enemies, weapons, offerings on the occasion of deliverance from danger, etc. were sacrificed to it. A significant part of these gifts were works of art. An important role was played by temples that gained all-Greek popularity, primarily the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The rivalry, first of noble families, and then of 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 appears - an art form previously unknown to Greece. The earliest sculptures were roughly carved in wood, often inlaid with ivory and covered with sheets of bronze. Improvements in the technique of stone processing not only affected architecture, but also led to the emergence of stone sculpture, and in the technique of metal processing - to the casting of sculpture from bronze. In the VII-VI centuries. BC. sculpture is dominated by two types: a naked male figure and a draped female figure. The birth of the statuary type of the naked figure of a man is associated with the main trends in the development of society. The statue depicts a beautiful and valiant citizen, a winner in sports competitions, who glorified his native city. According to the same type, tomb statues and images of deities began to be made. The appearance of the relief is mainly associated with the custom of erecting tombstones. Subsequently, reliefs in the form of complex multi-figure compositions became an indispensable part of the temple's entablature. Statues and reliefs were usually painted.

vase painting

Greek monumental painting is much less well known than vase painting. On the example of the latter, the main trends in the development of art are best traced: the emergence of realistic principles, the interaction of local art and influences that came from the East. In the 7th - early 6th century. BC. dominated by Corinthian and Rhodes vases with colorful paintings of the so-called carpet style. They usually depicted a floral ornament and various animals and fantastic creatures arranged in a row. In the VI century. BC. vase painting is dominated by the black-figure style: figures painted over with black lacquer stand out sharply against the reddish background of clay. Paintings on black-figure vases often consisted of multi-figured compositions based on mythological subjects: various episodes from the life of the Olympian gods, the exploits of Hercules and the Trojan War were popular. Less often there were scenes related to the daily life of people: the battle of hoplites, competitions of athletes, scenes of a feast, a round dance of girls, etc.

Since individual images were executed in the form of black silhouettes against a background of clay, they give the impression of being flat. Vases made in different cities have only their characteristic features. The black-figure style reached its peak in Athens. Attic black-figure vases were distinguished by the elegance of forms, high technique of manufacture, 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 vessel for wine (crater): the painting consists of several belts, on which multi-figure compositions are presented. Another magnificent example of painting is Exekia's kylix. The vase painter occupied the entire round surface of the wine bowl with one scene: the god Dionysus reclining on a ship sailing under a white sail, vines twisting near the mast, heavy clusters hanging down. Seven dolphins dive around, into which, according to myth, Dionysus turned the Tyrrhenian pirates.

Alphabetical writing and philosophy

The greatest achievement of the Greek culture of the archaic era was the creation of alphabetic writing. By transforming the Phoenician syllabic system, the Greeks created a simple way to capture information. In order to learn how 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 inhabitants of Greece literate. Thus, knowledge was “secularized”, which became one of the reasons for the absence of a priestly class in Greece and contributed to an increase in the spiritual potential of society as a whole.

A phenomenon of exceptional importance for European culture, the emergence of philosophy, is associated with the era of the archaic. Philosophy is a fundamentally new approach to the knowledge of the world, sharply different from that which prevailed in the Near East and in 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. Statement and formulation of problems, reliance on the human mind as a means of cognition, orientation to the search 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.

1. 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.
2. According to another explanation, early Greek philosophy practically did not differ in anything, except for the way of expression, from the stage-by-stage earlier mythological system of knowledge of the world.
3. 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 an early policy.

The polis and the relations of citizens in it - this is the model by analogy with which the 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 - Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes - are connected. The 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 philosophy that was born was spontaneously materialistic, the main thing in the work of its first representatives was the search for the material fundamental principles of everything that exists.

The founder of Ionian natural philosophy, Thales, considered such a fundamental principle to be water, which is in constant motion. Its transformations created and create all things, which in turn turn back into water. Thales represented the earth as a flat disk floating on the surface of primary water. Thales was also considered the founder of mathematics, astronomy and a number of other specific sciences. Comparing records of consecutive 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 boundless matter, which is 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 of the foundations, believing that not quality, but quantity, not substance, but form determine the essence of everything. Gradually, they began to identify things with numbers, depriving them of their material content. The abstract number turned into an absolute was conceived by them as the basis of the non-material 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 fixation of Homer's poems, carried out in Athens under Peisistratus, marked the end of the "epic" period. The epic, as a reflection of the experience of the whole society in the new conditions, had to give way to other types of literature. In this era, filled with violent social conflicts, lyrical genres are developing that reflect the experiences of the individual. Civicism distinguishes the poetry of Tyrtaeus, who inspired the Spartans in their struggle for the possession of Messenia. In his elegies, Tyrtaeus praised military prowess and expounded the norms of warrior behavior. And in later times they were sung during campaigns, they were also popular outside Sparta as a hymn to polis patriotism. The work of Theognid - an aristocratic poet who realized the death of the aristocratic system and suffered from it - is permeated with hatred for the lower classes and a thirst for revenge:

Firmly trample on the empty-hearted people, mercilessly
I’ll sharpen with a sharp stick, press down with a heavy yoke!

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

I have my bread mixed in a sharp spear. And in the spear -
Wine from Ismar. I drink, leaning on a spear.

The work of another great lyricist - Alkey - reflected the turbulent political life of that time. Along with political motives, his poems also contain drinking ones, they sound the joy of life and the sadness of love, reflections on the inevitability of death and calls to friends to rejoice in life:

The rains are raging. Great cold
Carries from the sky. The rivers are all chained ...
Let's drive away the winter. blazing bright
Let's spread the fire. Generously sweet to me
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 who tenderly loves her children. Sad motifs predominate in Sappho's poetry, which gives it a peculiar charm:

God equal seems to me fortunately
The person who is so close
Before you sits, your sounding gentle
listens to the voice
And a lovely laugh. At the same time I have
The heart would immediately stop beating.

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

Sweet to me is not the one who, feasting, at a full cup of speech
He only talks about litigation and about a regrettable war;
Dear me, who, Muses and Cyprites, combining good gifts,
The rule sets itself to be more cheerful at the feast.

The poems of Anacreon, marked by an indisputable talent and enchanting in their form, had a huge impact on European, including Russian, poetry.

By the end of the archaic era, 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, dates back to the end of the archaic era. At the same time, theatrical art arose, the roots of which lie in the folk rites of agricultural cults.