by Yurij V. ANDREEV
To sum up, one should say that the long and complicated way gone by the ancient Greek society for the first thousand years of its history was that of tests and errors. Now, we know for sure that a first attempt to establish the system of class domination in Greece, undertaken in pre-Homeric times already, was unsuccessful. The Mycenaean civilization that came into existence as a consequence of this attempt did not have, to all appearances, sufficient resources of internal durability, and so because of a first serious shake it disappeared from the historical scene.
Lack of vital capacity of the earliest phase of a class society form in the history of Greece may be explained by an extreme primitivism and lack of solidity of the social-economical basis, on which this form was erected. We should not forget that ways of class-making in the Mycenaean societies were the shortest of all the possible ones. The Achaean states were gradually absorbing small clan and territorial-clan communities, which were involved into a sphere of their influence, and making them objects of all-round exploitation in a system of the centralized palace economy. In most cases, this exploitation seems not to have exceeded the bounds of slightly modified tributary relations, and this promoted a long-time conservation of the main elements of the primitive social order among a great bulk of the working population of the Mycenaean states, near to their chief economical and cultural centers. Being just a sum of closed social organisms connected to each other very weakly, the palace states provided a source of downfall for themselves. The break-up of the Mycenaean social-economical system, which started at the turn of the 13th and 12th centuries B.C., gave the communities subject to the rulers of Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos and the other
Achaean realms back to their initial state of absolute political isolation. Again, inert elements lashed on Greece for a long time.
However, the new variant of classless society that appeared during the 12th and 11th centuries on the ruins of Mycenaean palaces and citadels may hardly be considered as a simple return back, to those primitive social structures of the Middle Hellas epoch, from which the first Achaean states had grown up. This was rather a repetition of the past experience, but now on the higher level of social development. It is clearly testified to by the situation taking shape within a chronological space (9th — 8th centuries) that should be called the «Homeric period» proper. At least, two very important moments differ this situation from the one, which had preceded the birth of the Mycenaean civilization. This is the far-going individualization of economical life in the Greek society, logically added by the atomization of its internal structure. In this connection, the patriarchal family's autonomous household comes resolutely to the fore in the sphere of economy. In the sphere of justice, this corresponds to the regime of private property, which is set enough (in spite of the still formally recognized sovereignty of community). A paradoxical combination of this new form of property with both the absence of a real class division and still very strong survivals of the clan order is a peculiarity of the Homeric society.
Seemingly, it was in the 9th — 8th centuries that the wide group of free peasantry was formed in Greece, which became subsequently the main social basis of the antique polis. In our opinion, this was the principal social-economical result of the Homeric period and, moreover, its most significant contribution to the development of the ancient Greek civilization. The self-sufficing peasant household, which is so vividly represented by Hesiod in his «Works and Days», was undoubtedly well known to Homer too. This is pointed at not only by characteristic details of the rural way of life dispersed in epic comparisons and numerous inserted episodes, but also by detailed descriptions of economical activities and everyday life of such personages as, for instance, Laertes and Eumaios in the «Odyssey». Differences in their social status do not have any considerable significance in this case. Important for them both is the principle of keeping house, viz. its orientation toward full self-maintenance with everything required and the same full independence upon the outside world.
The ancient Greek individual peasant household, like the middle and small landed property closely connected with it, was product of long
historical developments. Its origin must be plausibly sought in the depth of the Mycenaean epoch. The decisive, crucial, moment in this process of freeing private economical initiative was most likely a transitional period, i. е. 11th — 9th centuries. The collapse of the Mycenaean states contributed to a large degree to economical emancipation of the patriarchal family. Only now, it was entirely saved at last from hard fiscal pressure and vigilant surveillance of the palace bureaucracy.
A number of objective factors — above all, the wide inculcation of iron in Greek economy, as well as, to some extent, the state of long isolation from the outside world, in which Greece was during all that time, — could promote the strengthening of this position and made the outdated economical systems of the Bronze Age impossible to come back. Certainly, the potencies lying in the individual household of a peasant family (οίκος) could not expose themselves properly in the conditions of both the post-Mycenaean depression and ceaseless migrations. Only the transition of Greek tribes to sedentary life and reorientation of their rural economy from the preferred development of cattle breeding to that of farming allowed the οίκος economy to become firm and brought the making of the peasantry as a broad group of independent middle and small owners to a logical end.
As far as the available data allow us to suppose, the Homeric epics reflect three consequent stages in the development of the territorial community (δήμος):
1) The rural community — a structural cell (administrative-tax district) of a large centralized state, going back to the Mycenaean epoch and met with in a few episodes of the Homeric poems.
2) The isolated self-governing rural community, which became particularly widespread after the collapse of the Mycenaean palace realms and was a predominant form of political association during the entire «Dark Ages» period (11th — 9th centuries).
3) The self-governing city community — a rudimentary form of the city-state (polis). Non-epic sources (both written and archaeological) give us grounds to believe that the transition from rural community to city-state began in Greece c. the mid-8th century or, in some places, even earlier. Naturally, this important historical moment is not directly reflected in the epics. Only thanks to indirect hints one may guess that the polis as a new quality city-state was known to Homer already.
As a whole, the poet does not draw any clear distinction between the two basic types of communal organization, but he gives a syncretic model
of a community in general, combining the features of both the types. Topographically, the Homeric δήμος is taken as an isolated rural community, because there are no other settlements within its territory, except for the only polis, in which almost all the free population of the district is concentrated. At the same time, the polis (at least, in some episodes of the poems) has sufficiently obvious signs of a city-type settlement, the most important of such being the agora, the main vital center of a settlement, directly connected with a royal palace. Sociologically, the δήμος is an association of peasants-farmers mingled with a little portion of craftspeople and traders. However, the internal political life of this social organism seems to be too complicated for a small settlement or village. So characteristic a form of governing an epic community — in the person of a group of rulers (βασιλήες) — allows us to see in it a result of the fusion of several or even many villages and settlements, i. e. a primitive form of the city-state again.
Thus, a self-contradiction (one may even say, anachronism) of the Homeric model of community is quite clear. However, it is due not only to the syncretic confusion of similar phenomena, which is so usual for epic poetry, but also to the fact that the historical reality of the Homeric epoch, transitional in its nature, comprised in all likelihood a sufficient number of instances of various intermediate, hybrid, forms of social and political organization. Essentially, as one of such intermediate forms one may consider the early Greek polis in the aspect that took shape by the end of the Homeric period. Having already overstepped the narrow limits of the primitive neighbour community and closely come to the line, after which a state begins, the early polis continued, nevertheless, to keep for a long time many features and signs inherited from its direct precursor.
It is necessary to have in view that the process of urbanization that took place in the 8th century was just an initial stage of the so-called «city revolution» and, therefore, bore a very surface, «preliminary», nature. The earliest Greek cities were mostly military, political and religious centers of the rural neighbourhood subject to them. The separation of city from village on this stage of the development of polis presented a mechanical removal of masses of the population from center to periphery (internal colonization) or in the opposite direction, from periphery to center (συνοικισμός). And so, as a rule, the transition from rural community to city-state did not accompanied by any serious changes in the structure and nature of the Greek society.
Considering a phenomenon of the Greek polis from the point of view of modern historical typology, we may define it as a pre-class barbarian society in its specific city variant. It should be underlined once more that we speak of a rudimentary form of the state, which may be thought as an instrument of the class predominance just potentially, but did not have time yet to become such because of lack of the classes proper. At the same time, it is not correct to undervalue the impact, which the early polis had, by the fact of its existence, upon the beginning of a process of class-making. This process was developing much more intensively in cities, where large masses of people had to communicate very closely with each other in their everyday life, than in isolated rural communities. It was the polis community that became the social milieu, in which a radical rebuilding of the archaic structures of the barbarian society proved to be possible in order to prepare sufficient grounds for the fastest ripening of the basic classes of a new, slave-holding, society.
The early urbanization influenced very much the subsequent political development of the Greek society. Since the 8th century, it was going mainly in the area of the gradual consolidation and rising of republican institutions of a polis community, such as the council and popular assembly first and foremost. As it is well known, the primary result of the evolution of polis organization in the Archaic period was the establishment in the most advanced Greek regions of the antique form of democracy. The polis had time then to turn from an ephemeral union of the clan chiefs, as it had been initially, into a republic of free and enjoying full rights citizens, founded on the principle of sovereignty of the people. It is clear that so radical a transformation was impossible without the impetuous economical and cultural raising due to two and half centenaries of the Great Greek colonization. However, a general direction of this movement was assigned, as we think, on the earliest stage of the «Archaic revolution)), chronologically belonging to the late Homeric period (8th century). Starting just with that moment, the polis becomes the basic cross-linking element of the Greek civilization and keeps this significance up to the end of Classical Antiquity.