In The Ancient City, Fustel de Coulanges hands us the skeleton key unlocking classical civilization—the Indo-European domestic cult—showing this archaic religion to be the engine behind the rise and fall of the classical world. In his foreword, Dennis Bouvard views The Ancient City through the lens of generative anthropology, pointing the way to a post-liberal understanding of our own social order, informed by the imperative order described by Fustel.
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Yes, you can access The Ancient City - Imperium Press by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Greek Ancient History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
As yet we have given no dates, nor can we now. In the history of these antique societies the epochs are more easily marked by the succession of ideas and of institutions than by that of years.
The study of the ancient rules of private law has enabled us to obtain a glimpse, beyond the times that are called historic, of a succession of centuries during which the family was the sole form of society. This family might then contain within its wide compass several thousand human beings. But in these limits human association was yet too narrow; too narrow for material needs, since this family hardly sufficed for all the chances of life; too narrow for the moral needs of our nature, for we have seen how incomplete was the knowledge of the divine, and how insufficient was the morality of this little world.
The smallness of this primitive society corresponded well with the narrowness of the idea then entertained of the divinity. Every family had its gods, and men neither conceived of nor adored any save the domestic divinities. But he could not have contented himself long with these gods so much below what his intelligence might attain. If many centuries were required for him to arrive at the idea of God as a being unique, incomparable, infinite, he must at any rate have insensibly approached this ideal by enlarging his conception from age to age, and by extending little by little the horizon whose line separated for him the divine Being from the things of this world.
The religious idea and human society went on, therefore, expanding at the same time.
The domestic religion forbade two families to mingle and unite; but it was possible for several families, without sacrificing anything of their special religions, to join, at least, for the celebration of another worship which might have been common to all of them. And this is what happened. A certain number of families formed a group called in the Greek language a phratria, in the Latin a curia.1 Did there exist the tie of birth between the families of the same group? This cannot be affirmed. It is clear, however, that this new association was not formed without a certain enlargement of religious ideas. Even at the moment when they united, these families conceived the idea of a divinity superior to that of the household, one who was common to all, and who watched over the entire group. They raised an altar to him, lighted a sacred fire, and founded a worship.
There was no cury or phratry that had not its altar and its protecting god. The religious act here was of the same nature as in the family. It consisted essentially of a repast, partaken of in common; the nourishment had been prepared upon the altar itself, and was consequently sacred; while eating it, the worshippers recited prayers; the divinity was present, and received his part of the food and drink.
These religious repasts of the cury lasted a long time at Rome; Cicero mentions them, and Ovid describes them.2 In the time of Augustus they had still preserved all their antique forms. “I have seen, in those sacred dwellings,” says a historian of this epoch, “the repast displayed before the god; the tables were of wood, according to ancestral usage, and the dishes were of earthen ware. The food was loaves, cakes of fine flour, and fruits. I saw the libations poured out; they did not fall from gold or silver cups, but from vessels of clay, and I admired the men of our day who remain so faithful to the rites and customs of their fathers.”3 At Athens these repasts took place during the festival called Apaturia.4
There were usages remaining in the latest period of Greek history which throw some light upon the nature of the ancient phratry. Thus we see that in the time of Demosthenes, to be a member of a phratry one must have been born of a legitimate marriage in one of the families that composed it; for the religion of the phratry, like that of the family, was transmitted only by blood. The young Athenian was presented to the phratry by his father, who swore that this was his son. The admission took place with a religious ceremony. The phratry sacrificed a victim, and cooked the flesh upon the altar. All the members were present. If they refused to admit the newcomer, as they had a right to do if they doubted the legitimacy of his birth, they took away the flesh from the altar. If they did not do this, if after cooking they shared with the young man the flesh of the victim, then he was admitted, and became a member of the association.5 The explanation of these practices is that the ancients believed any nourishment prepared upon an altar, and shared between several persons, established among them an indissoluble bond and a sacred union that ceased only with life.
Every phratry or cury had a chief, a curion, or phratriarch, whose principal function was to preside at the sacrifices.6 Perhaps his attributes were at first more extensive. The phratry had its assemblies and its tribunal, and could pass decrees. In it, as well as in the family, there were a god, a worship, a priesthood, a legal tribunal, and a government. It was a small society that was modelled exactly upon the family.
The association naturally continued to increase, and after the same fashion; several phratries, or curies, were grouped together, and formed a tribe.
This new circle also had its religion; in each tribe there were an altar and a protecting divinity.
The god of the tribe was generally of the same nature as that of the phratry, or that of the family. It was a man deified, a hero. From him the tribe took its name. The Greeks called him the eponymous hero. He had his annual festal day. The principal part of the religious ceremony was a repast, of which the entire tribe partook.7
The tribe, like the phratry, held assemblies and passed decrees, to which all the members were obliged to submit. It had a chief, tribunus, φυλοβασιλεύς.8 From what remains to us of the tribe we see that originally it was constituted to be an independent society, and as if there had been no other social power above it.
CHAPTER II.
New Religious Beliefs.
1. The Gods of Physical Nature.
Before passing from the formation of tribes to the establishment of cities, we must mention an important element in the intellectual life of those ancient peoples.
When we sought the most ancient beliefs of these men, we found a religion which had their dead ancestors for its object, and for its principal symbol the sacred fire. It was this religion that founded the family and established the first laws. But this race has also had in all its branches another religion—the one whose principal figures were Zeus, Here, Athene, Juno, that of the Hellenic Olympus, and of the Roman Capitol.
Of these two religions, the first found its gods in the human soul; the second took them from physical nature. As the sentiment of living power and of conscience which he felt in himself inspired man with the first idea of the divine, so the view of this immensity which surrounded and overwhelmed him traced out for his religious sentiment another course.
Man in the early ages was continually in the presence of nature; the habits of civilized life did not yet draw a line between it and him. His sight was charmed by its beauties, or dazzled by the grandeur. He enjoyed the light, he was terrified by the night; and when he saw the “holy light of heaven” return, he experienced a feeling of thankfulness. His life was in the hands of nature; he looked for the beneficent cloud on which his harvest depended; he feared the storm which might destroy the labor and hope of all the year. At every moment he felt his own feebleness and the incomparable power of what surrounded him. He experienced perpetually a mingled feeling of veneration, love, and terror for this power of nature.
This sentiment did not conduct him at once to the conception of an only God ruling the universe; for as yet he had no idea of the universe. He knew not that the earth, the sun, and the stars are parts of one same body; the thought did not occur to him that they might all be ruled by the same being. On first looking upon the external world, man pictured it to himself as a sort of confused republic where rival forces made war upon each other. As he judged external objects from himself, and felt in himself a free person, he saw also in every part of creation, in the soil, in the tree, in the cloud, in the water of the river, in the sun, so many persons like himself. He endued them with thought, volition, and choice of acts. As he thought them powerful, and was subject to their empire, he avowed his dependence; he invoked them, and adored them; he made gods of them.
Thus in this race the religious idea presented itself under two different forms. On the one...
Table of contents
Foreword.
The Necessity of Studying the Earliest Beliefs of the Ancients in Order to Understand Their Institutions.
Notions About the Soul and Death.
Religion was the Constituent Principle of the Ancient Family.
The Phratry and The Cury. The Tribe.
Patricians and Clients.
New Beliefs. Philosophy Changes the Rules of Politics.
