古代城邦 (1870)

古代城邦（法语：La Cité antique）是法国历史学家努马-丹尼斯·甫斯特尔·德·库朗日出版于1864年的一部著作。受勒内·笛卡儿的思想启发基于古代历史学家和诗人的文本，作者探讨了古希腊和古罗马社会最古老的制度的起源。

在书的前言里作者强调他警告读者不要用今天的习俗来审查古代人的习俗，读者需要避免偏见，要使用事实证据来研究古代的人。

甫斯特尔·德·库朗日认为宗教和邪教是希腊和罗马政治机构的基础。每个家庭都有自己的信仰、神和崇拜。性别关系、家庭级别、财产、遗产等等都由宗教管理。随时间人们越来越需要管理人间的关系，使得互相之间的习俗相同，因此管理家庭的规则被推广到更大的集体，最后达到城市的规模。因此城邦的起源也是宗教，比如古罗马5年一次的清洗仪式同时被用来做人口统计，再比如用来崇拜当地神灵的公共宴会。

起初用来保障贵族专利的法律导致与平民的冲突和社会革命，而从之导致的社会公共利益演化成宗教的新基础。这样城邦逐渐形成，最后基督教的来临使得城邦覆灭。

The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (French: La Cité antique), published in 1864, is the seminal book of the French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889). Taking inspiration from René Descartes, and drawing on texts by ancient historians and poets, Fustel investigates the origins of the most archaic institutions in the Greco-Roman world.

Summary

Fustel de Coulanges sees religion and the ancestor cult as the foundation of the institutions of the Greeks and Romans. As part of their "domestic religion," each family had their own beliefs, gods, and forms of worship. The rules of gender and family hierarchy, ownership, and inheritance were governed by that cult.

Over time, Fustel argued, need forced people to regularize with one another and make them more consistent, and the rules governing the family were transferred to larger units called gens, arriving eventually at the city-state. Therefore, the origin of the city and of private property is religious, as suggested by the practice of lustration, a periodic purification ceremony in connection with the census of all citizens, and by the public banquets in honor of local gods.

The laws originally encoded the privileges of the aristocracy, causing great discomfort to the plebs and a social revolution in which the common well-being of society became the new basis of religion. The city thus came into being for some time, until its extinction with the arrival of Christianity.

Methodology

In the preface of the book, Fustel warns of the error that lies in examining the habits of ancient people with reference to those of today, when it is necessary to avoid our biases and study ancient peoples in the light of the facts.

Influence

The book is considered to be one of the most important French-language publications of the nineteenth century in virtue of its consistency, ingenuity, and style. Fustel set little store on this literary merit, but he clung tenaciously to his theories. When he revised the book in 1875, his modifications were slight, and it is conceivable that, had he recast it, as he often expressed the desire to do in the last years of his life, he would not have abandoned any part of his fundamental thesis.

Joseph M. McCarthy in particular claimed that The Ancient City was based on Fustel's in-depth knowledge of the primary Greek and Latin texts. Summarizing it in his own words, he wrote:Religion was the sole factor in the evolution of ancient Greece and Rome, the bonding of family and state was the work of religion, that because of ancestor worship the family, drawn together by the need to engage in the ancestral cults, became the basic unit of ancient societies, expanding to the gens, the Greek phratry, the Roman tribe, to the patrician city state, and that decline in religious belief and authority in the moral crisis provoked by Roman wealth and expansion doomed the republic and resulted in the triumph of Christianity and the death of the ancient city-state.

The book's methodology was highly influential in the development of Émile Durkheim's conception of religion, in particular his desire to eliminate all preconceived notions. Although Durkheim later criticized Fustel, as he did not consider ethnographic evidence, and, in Durkheim's view, misunderstood the Roman gens.

Contents

The text is split into five different books:

Book First: Ancient Beliefs

Book Second: The Family

Book Third: The City

Book Fourth: The Revolutions

Book Fifth: The Municipal Regime Disappears

Editions

The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, translated by Willard Small, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0801823046;