The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome
This outstanding work, which was first released in 1864 under the title La Cité Antique, covers society in both Rome and Greece during the reigns of Cicero and Pericles. Fustel de Coulanges created a thorough depiction of life in the ancient city using only a small portion of the data available to classical scholars today, producing a book that is still impressive today both for the richness of its portrait and the thesis it advances.
Fustel contends in The Ancient City that early religion served as the cornerstone of all civic activity. Fustel discusses topics including rites and festivals, marriage and the family, divorce, death, and burial, as well as political and legal systems as he develops his analogies between beliefs and laws. "The author asserts that religion "constituted the Greek and Roman family, established marriage and parental authority, regulated the order of relationship, consecrated the right of propriety, and right of inheritance. The city was built by the same religion after it had expanded and extended the family, and it ruled there as it had done in the family. All of the ancient institutions and private law were derived from it."
The Ancient City rightfully belongs with a number of groundbreaking books from the late nineteenth century that presented fundamentally fresh interpretations of ancient society and culture, as Arnaldo Momigliano and S. C. Humphreys write in their prologue. Fustel de Coulanges' early discoveries in The Ancient City are still relevant and thought-provoking today, and they are owed to both modern anthropology and classical literature.
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