The Ancient City

A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Willard Small

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486447308
• eBook ISBN: 9780486142357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

With this influential study, French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges initiated a new approach to Greek and Roman city organization. Fustel de Coulanges' 1864 masterpiece, La Cité antique, drew upon physical evidence as well as ancient documents rather than the usual post-Classical histories. The result is a fresh, accurate, and detailed portrait of the religious, family, and civic life of Periclean Athens and Rome during the time of Cicero.
This fascinating sociological account reveals the significance of kinship and the cult of the family hearth and ancestors to ancient Hellenic and Latin urban culture. It chronicles the rise of family-centered pagan belief systems, tracing their gradual decline to the spread of Christianity. Fustel cites ancient Indian and Hebrew texts as well as Greek and Roman sources. The ingenuity of his interpretations, along with his striking prose style, offer readers a vital and enduring historic survey.

BOOK FIFTH

THE MUNICIPAL REGIME DISAPPEARS

Chapter I

NEW BELIEFS. PHILOSOPHY CHANGES THE PRINCIPLES AND THE RULES OF POLITICS

IN what precedes we have seen how the municipal governments were constituted among the ancients. A very ancient religion had at first founded the family, and afterwards the city. At first it had established domestic law and the government of the gens; afterwards it had established civil laws and municipal government. The state was closely allied with religion; it came from religion, and was confounded with it. For this reason, in the primitive city all political institutions had been religious institutions, the festivals had been ceremonies of the worship, the laws had been sacred formulas, and the kings and magistrates had been priests. For this reason, too, individual liberty had been unknown, and man had not been able to withdraw even his conscience from the omnipotence of the city. For this reason, also, the state remained bounded by the limits of a city, and had never been able to pass the boundaries which its national gods had originally traced for it. Every city had not only its political independence, but also its worship and its code. Religion, law, government, all were municipal. The city was the single living force; there was nothing above and nothing below it; neither national unity nor individual liberty.

It remains for us to relate how this system disappeared, — that is to say, how, the principle of human association being changed, government, religion, and law threw off this municipal character which they had borne in antiquity.

The ruin of the governments which Greece and Italy had created was due to two principal causes. One belonged to the order of moral and intellectual facts, the other to the order of material facts; the first is the transformation of beliefs, the second is the Roman conquest. These two great facts belong to the same period; they were developed and accomplished together during the series of six centuries which preceded our era.

The primitive religion, whose symbols were the immovable stone of the hearth, and the ancestral tomb, — a religion which had established the ancient family, and had afterwards organized the city, — changed with time, and grew old. The human mind increased in strength, and adopted new beliefs. Men began to have an idea of immaterial nature; the notion of the human soul became more definite, and almost at the same time that of a divine intelligence sprang up in their minds.

Could they still believe in the divinities of the primitive ages, of those dead men who lived in the tomb, of those Lares who had been men, of those holy ancestors whom it was necessary to continue to nourish with food? Such a faith became impossible. Such beliefs were no longer on a level with the human mind. It is quite true that these prejudices, though rude, were not easily eradicated from the vulgar mind. They still reigned there for a long time; but from the fifth century before our era, reflecting men freed themselves from these errors. They had other ideas of death. Some believed in annihilation, others in a second and entirely spiritual existence in a world of spirits. In these cases they no longer admitted that the dead lived in the tomb, supporting themselves upon offerings. They also began to have too high an idea of the divine to persist in believing that the dead were gods. On the contrary, they imagined the soul going to seek its recompense in the Elysian Fields, or going to pay the penalty of its crimes; and by a notable progress, they no longer deified any among men, except those whom gratitude or flattery placed above humanity.

The idea of the divinity was slowly transformed by the natural effect of the greater power of the mind. This idea, which man had at first applied to the invisible force which he felt within himself, he transported to the incomparably grander powers which he saw in nature, whilst he was elevating himself to the conception of a being who was without and above nature. Then the Lares and Heroes lost the adoration of all who thought. As to the sacred fire, which appears to have had no significance, except so far as it was connected with the worship of the dead, that also lost its prestige. Men continued to have a domestic fire in the house, to salute it, to adore it, and to offer it libations; but this was now only a customary worship, which faith no longer vivified.

The public hearth of the city, or prytaneum, was insensibly drawn into the discredit into which the domestic fire had fallen. Men no longer knew what it signified; they had forgotten that the ever-living fire of the prytaneum represented the invisible life of the national ancestors, founders, and heroes. They continued to keep up this fire, to have public meals, and to sing the old hymns — vain ceremonies, of which they dared not free themselves, but the sense of which no one understood.

Even the divinities of nature, which they had associated with the sacred fire, changed their character. After having commenced by being domestic divinities, after having become city divinities, they were transformed again. Men finally perceived that the different beings whom they called by the name of Jupiter, might be only one and the same being; and thus of other gods. The mind was oppressed with the multitude of divinities, and felt the need of reducing their number. Men understood that the gods no longer belonged each to a family or to a city, but that they all belonged to the human race, and watched over the universe. Poets went from city to city, and taught men, instead of the old hymns of the city, new songs, wherein neither Lares nor city-protecting divinities appeared, and where the legends of the great gods of heaven and earth were related; and the Greek people forgot their old domestic and national hymns for this new poetry, which was not the daughter of religion, but of art and of a free imagination. At the same time a few great sanctuaries, like those of Delphi and Delos, attracted men, and made them forget their local worship. The mysteries and the doctrines which these taught accustomed them to disdain the empty and meaningless religion of the city.

Thus an intellectual revolution took place slowly and obscurely. Even the priests made no opposition, for as long as the sacrifices continued to be offered on designated days, it seemed to them that the ancient religion was preserved. Ideas might change, and faith perish...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction - THE NECESSITY OF STUDYING THE EARLIEST BELIEFS OF THE ANCIENTS IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THEIR INSTITUTIONS
• BOOK FIRST - ANCIENT BELIEFS
• BOOK SECOND - THE FAMILY
• BOOK THIRD - THE CITY
• BOOK FOURTH - THE REVOLUTIONS
• BOOK FIFTH - THE MUNICIPAL REGIME DISAPPEARS