The Ancient City A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome PDF
Preview The Ancient City A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome
THE ANCIENT CITY THE ANCIENT CITY A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome NUMA DENIS FUSTEL DE COULANGES with a new foreword by ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO AND S. C. HUMPHREYS The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London Copyright © 1980 byThe Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published in 1956 as a Doubleday Anchor Book The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 TheJohns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library ofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 1830-1889. The ancient city. Translation of Lacite antique. Includes bibliographical references. — 1. Citiesand towns, Ancient. 2. Rome Politics and — government. 3. Greece Politics and government. I. Title. JC51.F95 1980 938 79-3703 ISBN 0-8018-2304-8 CONTENTS FOREWORD Part i by Arnaldo Momigliano ix Part ii by S. C. Humphreys xv INTRODUCTION Necessity of studying the oldest Beliefs of the Ancients in order to understand their Institutions 3 BOOK FIRST ANCIENT BELIEFS i. Notions about the Soul and Death 7 11. The Worship of the Dead 13 hi.^ The Sacred Fire 17 iv. The Domestic Religion 26 BOOK SECOND THE FAMILY I. Religion was the constituent Principle of the ancient Family 32 11. Marriage among the Greeks and Romans 34 in. The Continuity of the Family. Celibacy forbidden. Divorce in Case of Sterility. Inequality between the Son and the Daughter 40 iv. Adoption and Emancipation 46 v. Kinship. What the Romans called Agnation 48 vi. The Right of Property 52 vii. The Right of Succession 64 1. Nature and Principle of the Right of Succession among the Ancients 64 v VI CONTENTS 2. The Son, not the Daughter, inherits 66 3. Collateral Succession 69 4. Effects of Adoption and Emancipation 71 5. Wills were not known originally 72 6. The Right of Primogeniture 75 viii. Authority in the Family 77 1. Principle and Nature of Paternal Power among the Ancients 77 2. Enumeration of the Rights composing the Pa- ternal Power 82 ix. Morals of the Ancient Family 86 x. The Gens at Rome and in Greece 92 1. What we learn of the Gens from Ancient Docu- ments 94 2. An Examination of the Opinions that have been offered to explain the Roman Gens 97 3. The Gens was nothing but the Family still hold- ing to its primitive Organization and its Unity 100 4. The Family (Gens) was at first the only Form of Society 104 BOOK THIRD THE CITY i. The Phratry and the Cury. The Tribe 109 11. New Religious Beliefs 112 1. The Gods of Physical Nature 112 2. Relation of this Religion to the Development of Human Society 114 hi. The City is formed 1*18 iv. The City, Urbs 126 v. Worship of the Founder. Legend of ^Eneas 134 vi. The Gods of the City 138 vii. The Religion of the City 147 1. The Public Meals 147 2. The Festivals and the Calendar 150 3. The Census 152 4. Religion in the Assembly, in the Senate, in the Tribunal, in the Army. The Triumph 155 viii. The Rituals and the Annals 159 1 CONTENTS VII ix. Government of the City. The King 165 1. Religious Authority of the King 165 2. Political Authority of the King 168 x. The Magistracy 172 xi. The Law 178 xii. The Citizen and the Stranger 185 xiii. Patriotism. Exile 190 xiv. The Municipal Spirit 193 xv. Relations between the Cities. War. Peace. The Alliance of the Gods 197 xvi. The Roman. The Athenian 202 xvii. Omnipotence of the State. The Ancients knew noth- ing of Individual Liberty 21 BOOK FOURTH THE REVOLUTIONS I. Patricians and Clients 216 11. The Plebeians 221 in. First Revolution 227 1. The Political Power is taken from the Kings, who * still retain their Religious Authority 227 2. History of this Revolution at Sparta 229 3. History of this Revolution at Athens 231 4. History of this Revolution at Rome 234 iv. The Aristocracy governs the Cities 239 v. Second Revolution. Changes in the Constitution of the Family. The Right of Primogeniture disappears. The Gens is dismembered 243 vi. The Clients Become Free 247 1. What Clientship was at first, and how it was transformed 247 2. Clientship disappears at Athens. The Work of Solon 253 3. Transformation of Clientship at Rome 257 vii. Third Revolution. Plebs enter the City 261 1. General History of this Revolution 261 2. History of this Revolution at Athens 270 3. History of this Revolution at Rome 275 VIII CONTENTS viii. Changes in Private Law. Code of the Twelve Tables. Code of Solon 298 ix. The New Principle of Government. The Public In- terest and the Suffrage 309 x. An Aristocracy of Wealth attempts to establish itself. Establishment of the Democracy. Fourth Revolution 314 xi. Rules of the Democratic Government. Examples of Athenian Democracy 320 xii. Rich and Poor. The Democracy falls. Popular Tyrants 328 xiii. Revolutions of Sparta 335 BOOK FIFTH THE MUNICIPAL REGIME DISAPPEARS i. New Beliefs. Philosophy changes the Principles and Rules of Politics 344 11. The Roman Conquest 352 1. A few Words on the Origin and Population of Rome 353 2. First Aggrandizement of Rome (753-350 B.C.) 356 3. How Rome acquired Empire (350-140 B.C.) 359 4. Rome everywhere destroys the Municipal System 366 5. The Conquered Nations successively enter the Roman City 372 in. Christianity changes the Conditions of Government 381 FOREWORD Part I. In the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century scholars working in different countries and in different fields produced radically new interpretations of ancient societies. H. S. Maine and Bachofen perhaps opened the series in 1861 with, J. J. respectively, Ancient Law and Das Mutterrecht. Numa D. Fustel de Coulanges followed up with La Cite antique in 1864, J. F. McLennan with Primitive Marriage in 1865. Bachofen's Die Sage von Tanaquil was published in 1870, E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture in 1871, and L. H. Morgan's Ancient Society in 1877. To these we must add two books by W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia and The Religion of the Semites, which successively appeared in 1885 and 1889. All these authors were of course aware of the recent achieve- ments^ comparative philology and mythology. They accepted the existence of an Indo-European civilization unconnected with Semitic civilization, but only Maine and Robertson Smith worked out their own models of ancient social life within the framework of these great prehistoric units characterized by common language and common political and religious institu- — tions. The others even Fustel de Coulanges, who gladly used — the Indians for comparison with Greeks and Romans elabo- rated evolutionary schemes that were essentially unrelated to the notions of Aryans and Semites. Each of the scholars men- tioned seems to have worked independently of the others, although (for instance) Morgan quotes Fustel and was on friendly personal terms with McLennan; the only clear excep- tion is Robertson Smith's avowed debt to McLennan on totemism. Fustel de Coulanges was born in 1830 and educated at the Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris, where one of his teachers X FOREWORD was J. D. Guigniaut, who translated and vulgarized F. Creuz- er's ideas about ancient religion. Fustel started with a history of the island of Chios (1856), notable for its sweep from the origins to the nineteenth century. He obtained his doctorate in 1858 with two theses, one on Polybius (Polybe, ou la Grece conquise) and one on the cult of Vesta (Quid Vestae cultus in institutis veterum privatis puhlicisque valuerit), in which some of the interests and theories of the Cite antique are anticipated. — — The Ancient City La Cite antique was written at Strasbourg, where Fustel became a professor. It was very much the work of a scholar who lived on the borders of German culture and had a poor opinion of it. Fustel was acquainted with what G. B. Niebuhr and A. Schwegler and young Theodor Mommsen had written about early Roman history. He was probably also well informed about the books of K. O. Muller, A. Boeckh, F. G. Welcker, and G. F. Schoemann on Greek mythology, religion, and institutions. Furthermore, he was necessarily de- pendent on German scholars for his notions about Indo- Europeans (or Aryans) because they had done most of the spadework in this field. But he intentionally disregarded mod- ern authorities in his Ancient City and, though he involved French and English writers in his provocative silence, there is no doubt that they were not his main target. In a posthumous fragment by him one reads: "I would rather be mistaken in the manner of Livy than that of Niebuhr." In 1864 Fustel was still mainly a classical scholar with an extraordinary familiarity with classical texts. His knowledge of other Aryan groups was as yet superficial and in the case of Indian civilization always remained so. The main attraction of the Aryan idea for him — was that it freed him from having to include the Semites and — therefore the Jews and the dangerous Bible in his discourse. After publishing The Ancient City Fustel became increas- ingly involved in the question of whether medieval French institutions were mainly German or Celtic or Roman in origin. He embraced the Roman thesis. As his main work on the sub- ject, the Histoire des institutions politiques de VAncienne France, began to appear after the great crisis of the Franco- Prussian War of 1870-71 (more precisely in 1875), it became symptomatic of the revulsion against Germany that then pre- vailed in France. After 1871 Fustel did indeed stand up as the
The list of books you might like
