THE SOCIETY OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY: THE MODERNIZATION OF HISTORY AND HISTORICAL ANALOGIES.

The article presents information on the society of classical antiquity. The question of the possibility of recurrence in history and of the validity of historical analogies is intimately associated with the entire problem of the course of the process of world history. Marxism, while recognizing the progressive and forward-moving character of social development, at the same time does not accept the conception of interrupted evolution ascending in a straight line. At the same time, western specialists in the history of the ancient world working on concrete historical themes act as though all the disputed questions of historical recurrence either do not exist at all or have already been solved unambiguously and in a universally recognized fashion. As in the past, authors of works on the world of classical antiquity continue to seek in the history of the Greeks and Romans formulas and lessons capable of serving modern political figures, to analyze modern times by analogy to that period, and vice versa. True, today there are no longer any adherents of the school of Edward Meyer, who totally identified Hellenistic and Roman society with capitalist, but such trends are nonetheless very powerful.