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La Cité Antique
Sep. 29th, 2016 05:53 pmI finally finished Fustel de Coulanges' La Cité Antique a few days ago. I'm not sure it belongs in the Treasures class, but it was certainly very interesting.
FdC begins with a hypothesis concerning the fundamental social unit of the Indo-Europeans. (Indo-Europeanism was in full flower in his day; attempts to treat IE as a sociological unit, not merely a linguistic one, were common - some of which had deadly consequences in the following century.) This, he says, was the family, as a political/religious unit, with its deities (deified ancestors), its priesthood (the father, with his sons as acolytes), and its law. He buttresses this with documents from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and ancient India. (It is worth noting that he doesn't consider other IE peoples, most notably the Persians; surely there is data of similar antiquity for them? He also includes some data from the Etruscans, who were not IE.) He traces Greek and Roman history as the evolution and extension of this structure to the clan, the town, and the city, and then its breakdown as various disenfranchised (the word is not strong enough) subgroups demanded a share in city life and power, culminating in the displacement of the ancient and tattered religious structures by universalizing religions such as Christianity.
Key to his argument is the claim that law was religious in nature throughout this period: law within the family (vehemently excluding those not of the family), within the clan (excluding those from outside the clan, but also those who were mere servants or collateral relatives), within the city (as before, but with the clan leaders forming an aristocracy and with a large proletariat of servants, clients, and foreigners). Such revolutionary periods as the age of tyrants are presented as an attempt by the lower classes to be admitted to the religious (and thence the legal and political) life of the city. It is, of course, a complicated story, but it seems to hold together reasonably well. I'll have to look for more recent discussions of these issues to see how well FdC's work holds up today.
There are a few obvious problems. To cite only one: Roman legend (cf. the Aeneid) claimed that refugee Trojans formed part of Rome's ancestry. FdC accepts this without much criticism, but I don't believe it's accepted today. I believe there is supposed to be some linguistic connection between Etruscan and some of the languages of ancient Anatolia, but actual direct migration doesn't seem to figure in.
Flawed though it is, I found the book fascinating, if very long.
FdC begins with a hypothesis concerning the fundamental social unit of the Indo-Europeans. (Indo-Europeanism was in full flower in his day; attempts to treat IE as a sociological unit, not merely a linguistic one, were common - some of which had deadly consequences in the following century.) This, he says, was the family, as a political/religious unit, with its deities (deified ancestors), its priesthood (the father, with his sons as acolytes), and its law. He buttresses this with documents from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and ancient India. (It is worth noting that he doesn't consider other IE peoples, most notably the Persians; surely there is data of similar antiquity for them? He also includes some data from the Etruscans, who were not IE.) He traces Greek and Roman history as the evolution and extension of this structure to the clan, the town, and the city, and then its breakdown as various disenfranchised (the word is not strong enough) subgroups demanded a share in city life and power, culminating in the displacement of the ancient and tattered religious structures by universalizing religions such as Christianity.
Key to his argument is the claim that law was religious in nature throughout this period: law within the family (vehemently excluding those not of the family), within the clan (excluding those from outside the clan, but also those who were mere servants or collateral relatives), within the city (as before, but with the clan leaders forming an aristocracy and with a large proletariat of servants, clients, and foreigners). Such revolutionary periods as the age of tyrants are presented as an attempt by the lower classes to be admitted to the religious (and thence the legal and political) life of the city. It is, of course, a complicated story, but it seems to hold together reasonably well. I'll have to look for more recent discussions of these issues to see how well FdC's work holds up today.
There are a few obvious problems. To cite only one: Roman legend (cf. the Aeneid) claimed that refugee Trojans formed part of Rome's ancestry. FdC accepts this without much criticism, but I don't believe it's accepted today. I believe there is supposed to be some linguistic connection between Etruscan and some of the languages of ancient Anatolia, but actual direct migration doesn't seem to figure in.
Flawed though it is, I found the book fascinating, if very long.
