La Cité antique

1864 book by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

The Ancient City (French: La Cité antique), published in 1864, is the most famous book of the French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889). Taking inspiration from René Descartes,^[1] and based on texts of ancient historians and poets, the author investigates the origins of the most archaic institutions of Greek and Roman society.

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.

Fustel de Coulanges sees religion and cult as the foundation of the institutions of the Greeks and Romans. Each family had their belief, their gods, and their worship. The rules of gender and family hierarchy, ownership, inheritance, etc., 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, arriving eventually at the city. Therefore, the origin of the city 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.

The book was so consistent throughout, so full of ingenious ideas, and written in so striking a style, that it ranks as one of the masterpieces of the French language in the 19th century. By this literary merit, Fustel set little store, but he clung tenaciously to his theories.^[2] 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.^[2]

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.^[3]

Translations

The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Notes

^ Fustel wrote late in life, "Jules Simon explained Descartes' Discours sur la méthode to me thirty years ago, and from that come all my works: for I have applied to history this Cartesian doubt which he introduced to my mind" (J. W. Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, vol. 2, New York: Macmillan, 1942, p. 363).
^ ^a ^b Bémont, Charles (1911). "Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 374–375.
^ Joseph M McCarthy, "Fustel de Coulanges, Numa" in Kelly Boyd, ed., Encyclopedia of historians and historical writing (1999) 1: 429–30. Vol. 1. Taylor & Francis, 1999.