Аннотация:The chapter considers the evolution of the Ancient Greek polis from its background in the Dark Age (11th to 9th centuries BCE) to the end of the Classical and the start of the Hellenistic periods (late 4th century BCE). The historical basis of polis was the variant of the third “way of development” of the early ancient societies, as defined in the typology of I.M. Diakonoff: at the Balkan Peninsula of the Second Millennium BCE it took the form of the so-called “palatial societies” of Achaean Greece, which was homoarchical, like most structures of the early antiquity at the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. The downfall of this society, the advent of the Iron Age and the eventual progress of economy brought to levelling the difference in the political statuses of hereditary groups that formed the homoarchical society of the Greek Dark Age and Archaic period (to the late 7th century BCE). The result was the emergence of the Classical polis as a heterarchical civil community. The function of its structures largely depended on the extreme solidarity of its members, and the latter was maintained with the help of the polis’ ideology, which took on a total character. Its emergence in the late 6th and the early 5th centuries BCE is comparable to the emergence of the Axis’ Time religions, which similarly totally penetrated the conscience of their adepts. The degradation of the polis’ ideology in the 4th century BCE, with the shift of elite priorities from promoting polis’ interests to the personal success and the growth of the mass indifferentism, brought to the crise of polis. Its outcome in the Hellenistic time was embedding the poleis that lost their independence into complex and essentially heterarchical structures. The actual history of polis as a heterarchical civil community was in fact extremely short (from the early 5th to the late 4th century BCE).
