La Cité antique : Étude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions de la Grèce et de Rome

By Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and Willard Small

Book Overview

In The Ancient City, Fustel de Coulanges hands us the skeleton key unlocking classical civilization--the Indo-European domestic cult--showing this archaic religion to be the engine behind the rise and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000M98MZO
• Release Date: January 1955
• Publisher: Doubleday Anchor Books
• Length: 396 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Corrective to rationalist bias in constitutional politics

Fustel marshalls historical evidence to show that in the classical city-state social organisation based on religion -- for example, the patrician order, family graves, the sacred fire, the god Terminus who demarcated property, shared ceremonial meals, etc. -- came before social organisation based on law. The Ancient City should be read as a corrective to the excessively rationalist bias in constitutional thinking which we inherit from the 18th century. Sadly, this important and rewarding book did not appear until one hundred years after the US Constitution was adopted.