The Ancient City Quotes

“Naming (“christening,” “deeming”) is more than a performative moral act; it is linguistic and aesthetic as well. Identifying the emergence and establishment of anti-sacrificial moral practices will take on a form distinctive to a particular social order; the consolidation of the originary “belief” or gesture should therefore be represented in ways that make it inseparable from the entirety of that order. Naming commemorates earlier establishments of practices of deferral, and by enhancing the self-referentiality of the social order as a whole makes it impossible to think outside of that order. It should be kept in mind that all social orders do this—orders in the liberal tradition simply deny they are doing so, and therefore do it haphazardly and in violent fits and starts. Every social order, however small or transient, develops its own “idiom,” because any exchange of signs involves the respective participants taking up the words, phrases and expressions of the others for both phatic purposes and as a “multiplier” of meanings—if I repeat what another has said with slight changes in wording and tone, I not only say what I have said, but create a complex relationship between what I have said and what the other has said (and whatever others he was responding to have said—and left unsaid), a relationship that remains largely tacit but all the more difficult to shake or exit for that very reason.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“The ancient city, like all human society, had ranks, distinctions, and inequalities.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“Render us rich and flourishing,” says an Orphic hymn; “make us also wise and chaste.” Thus the hearth-fire is a sort of a moral being; it shines, and warms, and cooks the sacred food, but at the same time it thinks, and has a conscience; it knows men’s duties, and sees that they are fulfilled. One might call it human, for it has the double nature of man; physically, it blazes up, it moves, it lives, it procures abundance, it prepares the repast, it nourishes the body; morally, it has sentiments and affections, it gives man purity, it enjoins the beautiful and the good, it nourishes the soul. One might say that it supports human life in the double series of its manifestations. It is at the same time the source of wealth, of health, of virtue. It is truly the god of human nature. Later, when this worship had been assigned to a second place by Brahma or by Zeus, there still remained in the hearth-fire whatever of divine was most accessible to man. It became his mediator with the gods of physical nature; it undertook to carry to heaven the prayer and the offering of man, and to bring the divine favors back to him. Still later, when they made the great Vesta of this myth of the sacred fire, Vesta was the virgin goddess. She represented in the world neither fecundity nor power; she was order, but not rigorous, abstract, mathematical order, the imperious and unchangeable law, ἀνάγκη [“necessity”], which was early perceived in physical nature. She was moral order. They imagined her as a sort of universal soul, which regulated the different movements of worlds, as the human soul keeps order in the human system. Thus are we permitted to look into the way of thinking of primitive generations. The principle of this worship is outside of physical nature, and is found in this little mysterious world, this microcosm—man.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“This worship of the sacred fire did not belong exclusively to the populations of Greece and Italy. We find it in the East. The Laws of Manu as they have come to us show us the religion of Brahma completely established, and even verging towards its decline; but they have preserved vestiges and remains of a religion still more ancient—that of the sacred fire—which the worship of Brahma had reduced to a secondary rank, but could not destroy. The Brahmin has his fire to keep night and day; every morning and every evening he feeds it with wood; but, as with the Greeks, this must be the wood of certain trees. As the Greeks and Italians offer it wine, the Hindu pours upon it a fermented liquor which he calls soma. Meals, too, are religious acts, and the rites are scrupulously described in the Laws of Manu. They address prayers to the fire, as in Greece; they offer it the first fruits of rice, butter, and honey. We read that “the Brahmin should not eat the rice of the new harvest without having offered the first fruits of it to the hearth-fire; for the sacred fire is greedy of grain, and when it is not honored it will devour the existence of the negligent Brahmin.” The Hindus, like the Greeks and the Romans, pictured the gods to themselves as greedy not only of honors and respect, but of food and drink. Man believed himself compelled to satisfy their hunger and thirst if he wished to avoid their wrath.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“These usages are attested in the most formal manner. “I pour upon the earth of the tomb,” says Iphigenia in Euripides, “milk, honey, and wine; for it is with these that we rejoice the dead.”10 Among the Greeks there was in front of every tomb a place destined for the immolation of the victim and the cooking of its flesh.11 The Roman tomb also had its culina, a species of kitchen, of a particular kind, and entirely for the use of the dead.12 Plutarch relates that after the battle of Platæa, the slain having been buried upon the field of battle, the Platæans engaged to offer them the funeral repast every year. Consequently, on each anniversary they went in grand procession, conducted by their first magistrates to the mound under which the dead lay. They offered the departed milk, wine, oil, and perfumes, and sacrificed a victim. When the provisions had been placed upon the tomb, the Platæans pronounced a formula by which they called the dead to come and partake of this repast. This ceremony was still performed in the time of Plutarch, who was enabled to witness the six hundredth anniversary of it.13 A little later, Lucian, ridiculing these opinions and usages, shows how deeply rooted they were in the common mind. “The dead,” says he, “are nourished by the provisions which we place upon their tomb, and drink the wine which we pour out there; so that one of the dead to whom nothing is offered is condemned to perpetual hunger.”14 These are very old forms of belief, and are quite groundless and ridiculous, and yet they exercised empire over man during a great number of generations. They governed men’s minds; we shall soon see that they governed societies even, and that the greater part of the domestic and social institutions of the ancients was derived from this source.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“Philosophy worked with the desacralized concepts produced by the elimination of the old order: concepts of reason, dialogue, justice and conscience reworked the terms associated with the practices of deliberation and accountability required by secularized democratic government.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“The patricians spoke in the name of “sacred custom,” and the plebeians replied in the name of “the law of nature” (254).”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“The ancient family was a religious rather than a natural association... the wife was counted in the family only after marriage had initiated her into the worship.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“If we compare this worship of the sacred fire with the worship of the dead, of which we have already spoken, we shall perceive a close relation between them.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“It is a strong proof of the antiquity of this belief, and of these practices, to find them at the same time among men on the shores of the Mediterranean and among those of the peninsula of India. Assuredly the Greeks did not borrow this religion from the Hindus, nor the Hindus from the Greeks. But the Greeks, the Italians, and the Hindus belonged to the same race; their ancestors, in a very distant past, lived together in Central Asia. There this creed originated and these rites were established. The religion of the sacred fire dates, therefore, from the distant and dim epoch when there were yet no Greeks, no Italians, no Hindus; when there were only Aryas. When the tribes separated they carried this worship with them, some to the banks of the Ganges, others to the shores of the Mediterranean. Later, when these tribes had no intercourse with each other, some adored Brahma, others Zeus, and still others Janus; each group chose its own gods; but all preserved, as an ancient legacy, the first religion which they had known and practiced in the common cradle of their race.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“But if we examine the rites which he observed or the formulas which he recited, we find the marks of what men believed fifteen or twenty centuries earlier.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“It is along these lines, I propose, that the unquestioned belief in communal origin, without which, as Coulanges shows, we face a more or less accelerated descent into a violence that is not only physical but creeps into our habits, our interaction, our very language, is possible.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“The possibility of criticizing the state makes the at least moral or discursive rejection of the demands of the state possible; one can be a “citizen of the world,” as the Stoics declared. Here we have the “new ideas” Coulanges mentioned much earlier, but they are ideas that provide no way of thinking about how to restore civil order. Philosophical reflection seemed mostly to serve as a way of forming communities of discourse freed from the utterly disfigured language of decadent ritual and degraded public order alike. If it served any political purpose, it was that of imperial conquest, insofar as it encouraged individuals to think of themselves as having no ties and obligations, and to desire only peace for themselves.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“The magistrate no longer exercised his authority for the benefit of peace and law, but for the interests and greed of a party. A command no longer had a legitimate title or a sacred character; there was no longer anything voluntary in obedience; always forced, it was always wanting for an opportunity to take its revenge. The city was now, as Plato said, only an assemblage of men, where one party was master and the other enslaved. The government was called aristocratic when the rich were in power, democratic when the poor ruled. In reality, true democracy no longer existed. (281)”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“Thus the ancient city was transformed by degrees. In the beginning it was an association of some hundred chiefs of families. Later the number of citizens increased, because the younger branches obtained a position of equality. Later still, the freed clients, the plebs, all that multitude which during centuries had remained outside the political and religious association, sometimes even outside the sacred enclosure of the city, broke down the barriers which were opposed to them, and penetrated into the city, where they immediately became the masters. (230)”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“Coulanges says that little is known about the change from primogeniture to equal property division among the brothers, assuming it took place gradually, but it is clear that the first fissure in the structure of the family empowered the highest of the lower classes, those brothers who would otherwise be excluded from inheritance. (In Rome, it seems the elevation of the younger brothers may have been through an alliance with the fathers).”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“The second half of The Ancient City concerns the centuries-long series of revolutions that overturned the ancient religious order. Coulanges introduces the discussion as follows: The causes of its destruction may be reduced to two. One was the change which took place in the course of time in ideas, resulting from the natural development of the human mind, and which, in effacing ancient beliefs, at the same time caused the social edifice to crumble which these beliefs had built, and could alone sustain. The other was a class of men who found themselves placed outside this city organization, and who suffered from it. These men had an interest in destroying it, and made war upon it continually. (186-187)”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“This power [i.e., to bring diverse groups “under the rules of a community”] was a belief. Nothing has more power over the soul. A belief is the work of our mind, but we are not on that account free to modify it at will. It is our own creation, but we do not know it. It is human, and we believe it a god. It is the effect of our power, and is stronger than we are. It is in us; it does not quit us: it speaks to us at every moment. If it tells us to obey, we obey; if it traces duties for us, we submit. Man may, indeed, subdue nature, but he is subdued by his own thoughts. (106)”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“Segundo as crenças dessa idades antigas, o homem vivo era apenas o representante por alguns anos de um ser constante e imortal, a família. Detinha o culto e a propriedade tão-somente como um depósito; seu direito a eles cessava com sua vida.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“It was granted to those who had three children, or who served in certain divisions of the army. Sometimes to construct a merchant vessel of a certain tonnage, or to carry grain to Rome, was sufficient to obtain it.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“By being a citizen of Rome, a man gained honor, wealth, and security. The Latins, therefore, became eager to obtain this title, and used all sorts of means to acquire it.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome

“Beyond these there is a miserable crowd, indigent, without political rights, of no weight in the city, envious, full of hatred, and condemned by their condition to desire a revolution.”
― Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome