This summer I’ve been reading a really old book about some really old people- Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City (1864). This book is excellently written and important for a number of reasons, but in my own case I wanted to read it because of the influence it had on some of my teachers- specifically, the Straussians. It’s important to “know thyself,” as the inscription said in Delphi. To do that I wanted to learn more about this book which was important for the education of political theorists who were students of Leo Strauss.
Harry Jaffa once told me when I visited him in Claremont that The Ancient City was the sole secondary source on the Greeks that Leo Strauss required them to read at the New School in the 1950s. That makes alot of sense if you know how Strauss interpreted texts, and how Fustel de Coulanges wrote his book. Strauss’ approach was to try to understand the author as he understood himself, and to do that, he insisted that the primary text of the author be the main thing we should pay attention to. That way one can help avoid the problem of incorrectly imposing things from outside of the text into the text- and writing off the author.
Fustel de Coulanges wrote The Ancient City exactly that way- using for evidence the primary texts of ancient historians (who wrote year by year accounts) and antiquarians (who attempted to gather various information on the past in a way similar to our Encyclopedias), as opposed to archaeological data. In 1864 when Fustel de Coulanges was writing in Strasbourg, there literally WAS no field of archaeology! Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans had yet to make their adventures to Troy, Mycenae, and Cyprus, much less systematize their discoveries (for an excellent readable account of those two, I recommend Leonard Cottrell’s The Bull of Minos). What is amazing about this book is that Fustel de Coulanges is able to tell a largely accurate account of how life was like in Greece and Rome simply through reading authors like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristotle, Livy, Plutarch, Varro, and Festus. (For a very balanced approach to Roman history that appreciates the great amount we can learn from primary texts as well as considering archaeological evidence on a parallel, I recommend chapter 1 of T.J. Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome.)
Fustel de Coulanges’ thesis was that in the ancient world, religion and politics were monolithically one. Specifically, the religion devoted household gods of the hearth, the sacred fire, was where Western civilization started, though of course it has changed. This is the big insight Straussians take from the book, and it is true; it is an important basis for their distinction between ancients and moderns (which they sometimes draw too starkly), and their distinction between faith and reason (Jerusalem and Athens).
I think what I might bring up with Jaffa today, having read Fustel de Coulanges, is that he seems to have a very different audience in mind than Straussian political theorists. Much like Tocqueville, it is clear that this book written in French is mainly for the French audience of his time. His targets were radicals like Robbespierre, Voltaire, and Rousseau who fancied themselves to be re-embracing the virtue of the Roman Republic at the same time they banned the Catholic religion in the name of atheism or a made-up “goddess of reason.” Here it is in Fustel de Coulanges’ Introduction:
Having imperfectly observed the institutions of the ancient city, men have dreamed of reviving them among us. They have deceived themselves about the liberty of the ancients, and on this very account liberty among the moderns has been put in peril. The last eighty years have clearly shown that one of the great difficulties which impede the march of modern society is the habit which it has of always keeping Greek and Roman antiquity before its eyes.
Last 80 years? That would be around 1784. The Estates-General meeting kicking off the Revolution was in 1789. Continued:
To understand the truth about the Greeks and Romans, it is wise to study them without thinking of ourselves, as if they were entirely foreign to us; with the same disinterestedness, and with the mind as free, as if we were studying ancient India or Arabia. Thus observed, Greece and Rome appear to us in a character absolutely inimitable; nothing in modern times resembles them; nothing in the future can resemble them. We shall attempt to show by what rules these societies were regulated, and it will be freely admitted that the same rules can never govern humanity again.
A monumentalist approach to the history of Rome is not a good idea for French republicans and probably isn’t even possible, in other words. And if the atheist French Revolutionaries thought they could be like Romans without religion- they were utterly mistaken.
I would argue the French revolution background can be found implicitly in other parts of the book too. Consider Book IV, Chapter VI, on what he calls the “second revolution” of the ancient city. This after the aristocrats rebelled against the kings, when the clients rebelled against the aristocrats. Fustel de Coulanges writes:
There is some analogy between the client of ancient times and the serf of the middle ages. The principle which condemned them to obedience was not the same, it is true. For the serf, this principle was the right of property, which was exercised at the same time over the soil and over man; for the client, this principle was the domestic religion, to which he was bound under the authority of the patron, who was its priest. Otherwise the subordination of the client and of the serf was the same; the one was bound to his patron as the other was bound to his lord; the client could no more quit the gens than the serf could quit the glebe….
…It appears certain that the condition of clients improved by degrees. At first they lived in the master's house, cultivating the common domain together. Later a separate lot of land was assigned to each. The client must already have found himself happier. He still worked for his master's profit, it is true; the field was not his; he rather belonged to that. Still he cultivated it for a long succession of years, and he loved it. There grew up between it and him, not that bond which the religion of property had created between it and the master, but another bond — that which labor and suffering even can form between the man who gives his care, and the earth which gives its fruits.
Fustel de Coulanges’ vision of what happened to the clients is very Tocquevillean. The social bonds of Aristocratic times are loosened and replaced by natural bonds in Democratic times- whether among workers on a farm or siblings in the family. So in the final analysis I’d say the The Ancient City fits well on a bookshelf next to Plato, as the Straussians might have it- but even better on a bookshelf next to Tocqueville.
Well done, well said, Chris. Polis-envy, or Antique-virtue envy, started early and did a lot of damage. Constant tried to handle it with the new category of ‘anachronism.’ Both Montesquieu and Rousseau contributed mightily to it and were great critics of it. Too bad Robespierre didn’t get the (clear, non-esoteric) message.
This seems to have been the warning of the great Hobbes: The learning of Greece is the terrible mischief of discontent in modern times.
But without that discontent, & without that learning, how would there ever have been an America?