THE AXIAL AGE

The major traditional cultures and their privileged centres are not the protagonists of the new ferment, but rather their antagonists. Babylonia and Egypt did not produce ‘axial’ characters, since they retreated into a formalistic and archaic re-elaboration of their cultural heritage, leading to esoteric Chaldean astrology and to Egyptian hermeticism. The energizing centres of the new tendencies have a marginal or unconventional location: they are the Greek poleis at the margins of the Persian Empire, the groups of deportees inside the Babylonian empire, the new communities of the Iranian highlands, and the political and religious circles outside the traditional power structures of India and China. The main expressions of the axial age – ethical religion (see further §2) and rational thought (the latter mainly applying to the ancient Greek world) – can be connected with individual identity, the development of the personality, the direct relationship between the human being and his problems, without the mediation of sociopolitical structures that are now over-expanded. The dimensions of the citizen-state, the ceremonial relations between subjects and power, become ineffective when the political community expands and assumes an imperial scale. The slow rise of the individual personality that one can trace (for the entire Late Bronze and Iron Age I-II) in customs and legal norms (see further §4), with the liberation of the individual from the network of ‘horizontally’ shared responsibilities (whether of group or ‘corporation’, as it is usually called) and ‘vertical’ ones (generational), came to a halt and gave way to an improvised reaction in Iron Age III, the age of imperial expansion. The structure created by conquest and administrative unification on a very wide scale left the individual too remote from access to, and even simply knowledge of, the political and religious centres of decision-making. While Near Eastern society was on the way to assume that image of ‘generalized slavery’ that later struck Greek observers of the fourth century, the ferment, the individualistic and ethical tendencies of the axial age, are signals of a reaction against complete absorption, a reaction necessarily (or at least preferably) placed in the interstices or on the frontiers, outer or inner, geographical or social, of imperial society.