Cultural Antagonism in Archaic Greece: Contracultural Worlds, Lifestyle and Worldviews from 700 to 480 B.C.

In the fourth century B.C., POLYARKHOS described the archaic culture of Greece as the scene of permanent ideological battles, whereby the main conflict consisted in a battle between the pleasure culture of the Hedonists and its counterculture, the culture of moderation and restraint, which stand in a dialectic relation to one another. POLYARKHOS` `historical` retrospective of a surrounding dominant culture and a reactive contraculture lends the social scientific concept of contraculture proposed by YINGER an unexpected, deep historical dimension. As complements, POLYARKHOS and YINGER together provide an adequate analytic tool for a clearer understanding of the divergences and antagonisms in the daily world of archaic Greece. In a macrohistorical analysis, in the sense of the history of mentalities, the long-standing conflict between the culture of pleasure of the Hedonists and the culture of `middling` of the moderate citizen will be investigated. In doing so, the starting point will be the social scientific problem of the contraculture; then the material and literary culture of archaic Greece will be examined (and not vice versa). In microhistorical case studies on topics that arise naturally from the available sources, the two opposing mentalities will then be examined with respect to their influence and effects on the societal reality of the time. Thanks to this combination of macro and microhistorical investigation, as well as to the concept of contraculture, the proposed research in the area of the cultural history of archaic Greece will yield a complex interweaving of contracultural connections that are not to be abstracted any longer as easily as in the past studies to a process of modernization or democratization that runs in a straight line. The attempts of Western European historiography over centuries to trace the evolution of Western-style democracy back to archaic Greece as pre- Classical Greece will once and for all lose its legitimatization.