DIALOGUE AS AN ELEMENT OF URBAN CULTURE OF POSTCLEISTHENIC ATHENS

Abstract

The research shows the way to liberate the word from the imperative hierarchical social system to the equality, to the cooperative search for truth. It’s the way from Logos to Dialogos. The article analyzes the development of the social structure of Athens from the Mycenaean Age to the end of the 6th century BC. The author highlights the main stages and principles of this development: dysnomia, eunomia, isonomia. Special attention was paid to the definitions and explication the relationship between these principles. Dysnomia is characterized as wrong order, lawlessness. It was a principle of total political inequality, where the class of urban aristocracy is endowed with full rights, and ordinary people do not have them at all. Eunomia is the conception of good order, the right social system. It was a principle of geometrical equality that left power in the hands of the aristocracy, but expanded the rights of the people. The author shows that Eunomia“s role in the development of the political equality in Athens as a transitional stage to the notion of Isonomia was fundamental. He claims that the emergence of dialogue as a social phenomenon, and partly as a genre, in Athens becomes possible after Cleisthenes“ reforms on the ground of principle of Isonomia (an equal distribution of political power or full arithmetical equality).