Download PDF The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, by Fustel de Coulanges
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The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, by Fustel de Coulanges
Download PDF The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, by Fustel de Coulanges
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This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
- Sales Rank: #14563237 in Books
- Published on: 2008-12-08
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 10.00" h x 1.20" w x 7.50" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 532 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
One of the Best and most Instructive Books Ever Written
By Laura Knight-Jadczyk
I read references to the work of Fustel de Coulanges in the writings of the great and heroic French historian, Marc Bloch, (The Historian's Craft) and was intrigued enough to get and read it. What an eye-opener! It is undoubtedly among the top 10 seminal historical works ever written, in my opinion. Considering the data that Fustel did not have access to, for which some criticize him, makes this achievement even that much more impressive. His thought revealed in his writing is clear, insightful, brilliant.
What you will find in this book is a masterful story of the descent of the many institutions to which we are still heir though the context and specific manifestations have changed. In many cases, we believe things about why this or that custom has always been with us that are wrong, and Fustel sets out the evidence for what is really behind such things as marriage ceremonies, carrying the bride over the threshold, the foundations of the legal system including why it was the eldest son who got everything for thousands of years, and so forth. There are many questions about why things are the way they are answered in this book.
As other reviewers have noted, there are many descriptions in "The Ancient City" that will bring elements of the Bible to mind. The big question nowadays is: did the Bible borrow from other stories and cultures to create a "history of Israel" that never actually happened? Were some of those stories Greek? And were the Greek stories influenced by elements from Anatolia and Mesopotamia, coming to the Bible by a circuitous route? Did the authors of the Septuagint borrow from Homer and Herodotus?
These are all questions that are interesting and can be better formulated by also reading Russel Gmirkin's book: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (Library Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies)and Bruce Louden's book: Homer's Odyssey and the Near East
Despite some of the nit-picking criticisms that have been directed at Fustel over the years, I've never found a significant argument that Fustel got it wrong. His sweeping overview of "how things must have happened" by taking what we know and back-engineering it, is amazing. Everyone should - and can - read it because Fustel was not a stuffy academic who wanted to wrap bizarre ideas in obscure language: he wanted to set out a rational view of why our culture is the way it is which can seem to be totally irrational until you understand what is behind things. If he had had knowledge of periodic cosmic catastrophes such as those explicated in the works of Victor Clube and Bill Napier, (The Cosmic Serpent as well as Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture he would have been able to take the topic to its most basic level: fear of death manipulated by individuals seeking power. For that part of the story, you need to read Becker's Escape from Evil.
In any event, The Ancient City is definitely a big piece of the puzzle. If you read the works of Julius Caesar, (Caesar's Commentaries. The Complete Gallic Wars. Revised.: Revised Edition (Latin Edition) you will want to read Fustel first so as to better understand that most amazing of heroes, the one who could have saved Rome had the wealthy elite not been so greedy and psychopathic, and had he not been so humane and forgiving.
In short, in order to understand a lot of things about ancient history, the history of Rome, and our own civilization which is the daughter of Rome, you need to read Fustel. And you will enjoy it and be glad you did!
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Classic introduction to Mediterranean society
By Christopher P. Atwood
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.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Essential Classic, explains Pagan Religion of Athens & Rome
By A Customer
Although originally appearing in 1864 and based only on reading
the classical literature, it can correct much of the nonsense
in most current work about Athenian Democracy, Roman Empire
or the realities of Indo-European Pagan Religion as practiced
in the City-States of the Ancient World.
Also contains the detailed information to show that the
gens (family group) based mounted invaders who brought the Olympian
Gods to Ancient Europe had no only wagons, but iron swords and
advanced astronomical knowledge, since their hearth-based altars and
ceremonies are based on the requirements of the ancient iron-working
and weapon mending techniques, and they could tell anniversary dates which
means they knew how to tell when a solar year from any date had elapsed.
The book was originally written in scholarly protest against the
claims of Emperor Louis Napoleon III that he was re-establishing the Roman Empire
and the Athenian Polis,etc. It remains an excellent antidote to the
foolish claims today to have re-established Ancient Ways by various political and
social gadflies.
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