The Ancient City

This article is about the history book. For other uses, see ancient city (disambiguation).

The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (French: La Cité antique), published in 1864, is the seminal book of French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889). Taking inspiration from René Descartes,^[1] and based on texts of ancient historians and poets, Fustel investigates the origins of the most archaic institutions in the Greco-Roman world.

The Ancient City

Fourth English edition, 1882
Author	Fustel de Coulanges
Original title	La Cité Antique
Translator	Willard Small
Language	French
Genre	History
Publication date	1864
Publication place	France
Published in English	1877
Pages	522 (first edition)
Original text	La Cité Antique at French Wikisource
Translation	The Ancient City at Internet Archive

Summary

Fustel de Coulanges sees religion and the ancestor cult as the foundation of the institutions of the Greeks and Romans.^[2] Referred to as the "domestic religion", each family had their own belief, gods, and worship. The rules of gender and family hierarchy, ownership, inheritance, were governed by that cult.

Over time, need has led men to regularize and make more consistent their relations with one another, and the rules that govern the family were transferred to increasingly larger units called gens, arriving eventually at the city-state. Therefore, the origin of the city and of private property is also religious, as is witnessed by the practice of lustration, a periodic purification ceremony in connection with the census of all citizens, and by the public banquets in honor of local gods.

The laws originally encoded the privileges of the aristocracy, causing great discomfort to the plebs and a social revolution in which the common well-being of society became the new basis of religion. The city thus came into being for some time, until its extinction with the arrival of Christianity.

Methodology

In the preface of the book, he warns of the error that lies in examining the habits of ancient people with reference to those of today, when it is necessary to avoid our biases and study ancient peoples in the light of the facts.

Influence

The book is considered to be one of the most important contributions to publications in the French language of the 19th century due to its consistancy, ingeniouity, and style. By this literary merit, Fustel set little store, but he clung tenaciously to his theories. When he revised the book in 1875, his modifications were very slight, and it is conceivable that, had he recast it, as he often expressed the desire to do in the last years of his life, he would not have abandoned any part of his fundamental thesis.^[3]

Joseph M. McCarthy in particular had argued that it was based on his in-depth knowledge of the primary Greek and Latin texts. Summarizing it in his own words:

Religion was the sole factor in the evolution of ancient Greece and Rome, the bonding of family and state was the work of religion, that because of ancestor worship the family, drawn together by the need to engage in the ancestral cults, became the basic unit of ancient societies, expanding to the gens, the Greek phratry, the Roman tribe, to the patrician city state, and that decline in religious belief and authority in the moral crisis provoked by Roman wealth and expansion doomed the republic and resulted in the triumph of Christianity and the death of the ancient city-state.^[4]

The book's methodology was highly influential in the development of Émile Durkheim's conception of religion, in particular his desire to eliminate all preconceived notions.^[5] Although Durkheim later criticized Fustel, as he didn't consider ethnographic evidence, and in Durkheim's view, misunderstood the Roman gens.^[6]

Contents

The text is split into five different books:

• Book First: Ancient Beliefs
• Book Second: The Family
• Book Third: The City
• Book Fourth: The Revolutions
• Book Fifth: The Municipal Regime Disappears

Editions

• The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, translated by Willard Small, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0801823046;