Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to identify the most important problems of the crisis of the political in the first stage of Western civilization – the Greek world in the IV–II centuries BC. The crisis of the political is treated as a unique constellation of political, supra-political, and apolitical factors. The paper explores a hypothesis of how the power elite eliminates the core features of the political – tensions of consciousness and natural human hostilities – and substitutes them with management techniques that cause public apathy towards previously established democratic institutions. A theatrical model of life with an intensified function of individualizing social roles is an unavoidable result of such processes.