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

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Summary: on history now of history
Review: Fustel de Coulanges describes a society that I found incredible. How could it be the case that a healthy society found itself founded solely under the patriarchal power of each family's pater? The pressure of such a state seems stifling. The father carried out the priest function for each family's hearth gods. A grander appreciation of the religion of the land led to city-making and laws. However, the father's grasp remained for a long time invincible, unquestionable.

After Fustel de Coulanges establishes the city, its laws, its religion and its constituent parts, the family, it undergoes a series of revolutions. These revolutions create a diminishing of the father's power and of the priest's singular authority, while simultaneously generating a partly enfranchised lower class and, to a certain extent, individual rights.

As the preface of Arnaldo Momigliano points out, there is no resolution to the paradox of the ancient city. Fustel de Coulanges seems to idealize the Arcadian piety of the earliest family groups and their persistent worship, while at the same time valorizing the rights of the individual and cessation of caste-like limitations rampant in the Mediterranean world.

This history magnificently documents change. Certain shifts will seem abrupt (from the Roman Empire to Christianity in four pages), certain absences notable (there is little discussion of Alexander in Greece's history, despite such early ecumenicalism), however the might and seductive nature of the narrative make thoughtfully provoking history.

Fustel de Coulanges has begun his history with terms such as sacred fire, ancestor worship, land, gods, family, city, law, and revolution to document changes that we can recognize. This book seems a little like a "Decline and Fall" of sacred institutions rather than political entities. I do not think that this work provides a mirror of the Greek and Roman city, but I think readers will leave it without disappointment and full of admiration from the creation wrought by the author's intuition and knowledge of ancient sources. The whole thing is spectacular.

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Summary: Classic introduction to Mediterranean society
Review: 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.

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Summary: Wonderful
Review: In light of the more detailed reviews below, I can only add my layman's acclamation for this brilliant and timeless work of classical scholarship. This is one of the works that will be indispensible for any study of the subjects that it treats of (i.e. the Greek polis and the Roman state) because it manages to state on of the basic points of view about the material that a scholar can take with such lucidity and force that it's these will remain the best exposition of that point of view no matter what else subsequent scholarship uncovers. It is not quite on par with Gibbon, but it will always be relevant to students of the subject, in the same way the "Decline and Fall" will be. This is one of the books that is canonical in this field. Highly recommended.