The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome [Paperback]

Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges (Author), Arnaldo Mornigliano (Foreword), S. C. Humphreys (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1980

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: - £ vjum- - (" f BOOK SECOND. THE FAMILY. CHAPTER I. RelJgifiaWS.a.Jtlie- constituent Principle of the ancient Family. If we transport ourselves in thought to those ancient generations of men, we find in each house an altar, and around this altar the family assembled. The family meets every morning to address its first prayers to the sacred fire, and in the evening to invoke it for a lasttime. In the course of the day the members are once more assembled near the fire for the meal, of which they partake piously after prayer and libation. In all these religious acts, hymns, which their fathers have handed down, are sung in common by the family. Outside the Chouse, neiar at hand, in a neighboring fieldTtEere is a tomb — the second home of this family. Thereseveral, generations of ancestors repose together; deathjiasLnotseparated them. They remain grouped in this second existence, and continue to form an in dissoluble family.1 1 The use of family tombs by the ancients is incontestable; it disappeared only when the beliefs relative to the worship of the dead became obscured. The words raifot nurot, riiifos Tuj Between the living part and the dead part of the family there is only this distance of a few steps which separates the house from the tomb. On certain days, which are determined for each one by his domestics religion, the living assemble near their ancestors ; they offer them the funeral meal, pour out milk and wine to them, lay out cakes and fruits, or burn the flesh of a victim to them. In gxchangeJbr these offerings they ask protection; they call these ancestors their gods, ami ask them to render the fields fertile, the house prosperous, and their hearts virtuous. Generation alone was not the foundation of the ancient family. What proves this...

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ancient or modern, the city is among man's most complex creations and probably the most illustrative of both his best and worst qualities. The Ancient City, originally published in the 1870s, provides a 19th-century French view of Greek and Roman metropolises.

(Washington Post )

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (May 1, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801823048
• ISBN-13: 978-0801823046
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #152,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic introduction to Mediterranean society, January 24, 2001

By 

Christopher P. Atwood (Bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Paperback)

I was first exposed to this book in an anthropology class, where the professor used it to introduce the anthropological concept of descent, i.e. the inheritance of collective rights to valuable resources (above all land), through birth in a clan. Having read and research much more on this topic, and come back to "Ancient City," I find it still one of the most lucid expositions of descent and lineage institutions. (Note, though, that Mediterranean clans are somewhat unusual in being endogamous, not exogamous, like those of the Eastern Asia or sub-Saharan Africa).

Readers familiar with Herodotus or Livy will find their questions about the importance of bones of heroes and cult images answered in this book.

Also for anyone familiar with the Old Testament, and hoping to learn more about its social background, this book ought to be a fascinating read. Page after page can be annotated with Biblical verses (it is hard to believe that Fustel de Coulanges was not thinking of these verses when he wrote the book). The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is, in part, a recognizable Mediterranean family God--although Fustel de Coulanges argues that this same God, when revealed in the Christian Gospel, decisively transformed the ancient city into a new civilization based not on family gods, but on one universal God.

Fustel de Coulanges works with a typical 19th century social evolutionist view, one that is hardly acceptable today. His lack of knowledge about the other areas leads him to assume, for example, that endogamy is an inherent feature of clan-family religion; as noted above, this is incorrect. Once you control for these understandable errors, however, the progression from family to tribe to city, while unacceptable as a history, does make the exposition easy to follow.

Finally, when looking at this work in the context of today's knowledge particularly of archeology, what "Ancient City" strongly implies is the continuity between Bronze Age and Iron Age civilization in the Mediterranean. Twentieth century historians (including Momigliano, who wrote an introduction for the paperback edition) often seem to work with the assumption that the cataclysm of 1250-1200 BC created a tabula rasa in Greek history. To Fustel de Coulanges, the post-monarchic era from 700 BC on is not the defining moment of Greek and Roman civilization, but only a phase in its transformation into the semi-universal civilization of the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods.

To conclude, this book is still an important work that should stimulate thought on the clan-tribal foundations of both classical and Biblical civilization.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Classic, explains Pagan Religion of Athens & Rome, October 2, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Paperback)

Although originally appearing in 1864 and based only on reading the classical literature, it can correct much of the nonsense in most current work about Athenian Democracy, Roman Empire or the realities of Indo-European Pagan Religion as practiced in the City-States of the Ancient World.

Also contains the detailed information to show that the gens (family group) based mounted invaders who brought the Olympian Gods to Ancient Europe had no only wagons, but iron swords and advanced astronomical knowledge, since their hearth-based altars and ceremonies are based on the requirements of the ancient iron-working and weapon mending techniques, and they could tell anniversary dates which means they knew how to tell when a solar year from any date had elapsed.

The book was originally written in scholarly protest against the claims of Emperor Louis Napoleon III that he was re-establishing the Roman Empire and the Athenian Polis,etc. It remains an excellent antidote to the foolish claims today to have re-established Ancient Ways by various political and social gadflies.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ancient City: A Study of Pagan Religion and the Rise of Christianity., June 19, 2006

By 

New Age of Barbarism "zosimos" (EVROPA.) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Paperback)

_The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome_ is a translation of _La Cite Antique_ of Fustel de Coulanges, first published in 1864, and made available as a translation by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges was a French classicist who devoted his attention to the ancient pagan civic religions of the Greeks and Romans, contrasting this with that of the Indians (Aryans). His ideas concerning this ancient pagan religion were part of a milieu of social evolutionary ideas that included H. S. Maine and J. J. Bachofen. He also wrote on the origins of the Gauls and French society and his ideas concerning their Roman origins were put to use by various extreme rightist organizations such as the Action Francaise of Charles Maurras. The writings of Fustel de Coulanges have proven particularly profitable for many later French sociologists and anthropologists, though they were to come to reject certain of his ideas as not being confirmed by historical evidence. Christianity played a special role in the theories of Fustel de Coulanges as the subsequent religion which overtook the pagan Greek and Roman civic religion and supplanted it with a universalist system. In addition, Fustel de Coulanges wrote against the various socialist theorists of the time, emphasizing the role of private property among the earliest Greeks and Romans. This book includes a Foreword by Arnaldo Momigliano and S. C. Humphreys which points to many of the central issues involved in the reading of Fustel de Coulanges and the text of _The Ancient City_ proper.

To begin, the author notes the essential necessity of studying the earliest beliefs of the ancients in an effort to understand their institutions. The author next turns his attentions to the earliest beliefs about the soul and death. In particular, the abode of the dead is discussed, as well as the need of the dead for food (noting that on certain days the ancients were to bring food to the tombs of the departed). The author also notes the practice of the worship of the dead. The deified souls of the departed were known as demons or heroes to the Greeks and as Lares, Manes, or Genii to the Latins. The author also discusses the role of the sacred hearth-fire and the worship of fire. This hearth-fire was always kept burning. Next, the author turns his attention to the ancient domestic religion, emphasizing the patriarchal society that existed and the role of the family in that religion. Each family was ruled over by the father, who may bequeath his rule to his eldest son, and each family preserved its own gods (the ancestors) and the sacred fire. The author discusses such important aspects of the ancient family as marriage (in which a meal was shared between the bride and her husband initiating the bride into the worship of the husband's family), kinship, the right of succession, property (an important institution for the ancient family, though one that was passed down from father to son exclusively), authority in the family, and morals in the family. In particular, the author also discusses the gens at Rome and Greece (noting the aristocratic nature of the Roman clan and showing the contrast between plebeians and patricians). Following this discussion, the author turns his attention to the ancient city proper. Here, the author notes how while the ancient domestic religion prohibited families from mingling, it was still possible for the ancient families to unite in a phratria (to the Greeks) or curia (to the Latins). The author also shows how new religious beliefs formed, based on the worship of natural phenomena, invoking such ancient names for the sun as Hercules (the glorious), Phoebus (the shining), Apollo (he who drives away night or evil), Hyperion (the elevated Being), and Alexicacos (the beneficent). The author shows that while the ancient family domestic religion involved the worship of ancestors, these gods came to be present for all. The author discusses the city and its various customs, including the religion of the city and its gods. Here, he notes such things as public repasts, festivals and the calendar, the census, and religion in the assembly, in the Senate, in the Tribunal, in the Army, and in the Triumph. The author also discusses various rituals, the king, the magistracy, the law, and the citizen and stranger. In addition, the author also discusses ancient patriotism and the means to exile. Finally, the author discusses war, peace, and the alliance of the gods. This brings the author to a discussion of the omnipotence of the state and the lack of individual liberty among the ancients. The next section of this book concerns the various revolutions that occurred as plebeians demanded more rights from the ancient order, leading eventually to the creation of democracy. In the first revolution, political authority was taken from the king (although the king was still to retain religious authority). The author discusses this revolution was it played out at Sparta, Athens, and Rome. At this time, the aristocracy governed the city. In the second revolution, various changes occurred in the constitution of the family and the right of primogeniture disappeared. It was at this point that the clients became free (the author mentions in particular the work of Solon). In the third revolution, the plebs entered the city. The author discusses this revolution as it played out at Athens and Rome. The author also discusses changes in the private law, the Code of the Twelve Tables, and the Code of Solon. In the fourth revolution, an aristocracy of wealth tried to establish itself and this lead to the establishment of democracy and popular suffrage. However, it is in the conflict between rich and poor that democracy failed and popular tyrants arose. The final section of this book is devoted to the disappearance of the municipal regime. Here, the author notes how new beliefs arose as the traditional religious structures were changed to become more universal. The author discusses the Roman conquest and the subsequent rise of Christianity. By calling to itself the whole human race, Christianity made the most radical change to the pagan religion.

This book provides an excellent account of the earliest ancient Greek and Roman pagan religion that revolved around the family and its subsequent demise with the rise of the Romans and the beginnings of Christianity. It is the universal message of Christianity that lives on from most ancient times. This book is a fascinating sociological account of the ancient city and its religion and customs, showing in detail the ancient pagan belief system. Fustel de Coulanges is very learned and argues extensively from many ancient sources, both Greek and Roman (but also mentioning ancient Indian and Hebrew sources as well).