50: Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, part 1: Sacred Fire, Sacred Dead

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889) provides us with the most in-depth account of the ancient religion upon which the city-states of Greece and Rome were founded. While the Hellenes later believed in concepts such as reincarnation, the division of body and soul, and gods that ruled over whole empires, Coulanges asserts that in their earliest days - hundreds or thousands of years before the periods for which we have written documentation - the Indo-Europeans believed that the dead continued to live on in the same body, underground. These dead ancestors became gods in the imaginations of the early Hellenes, bound to the land and the object of a secret worship carried out only by their descendants. Alongside these peculiar beliefs was the practice of keeping a sacred hearthfire in the center of the home - the home being the temple of the domestic religion. This fire was regarded as a literal god, real and living, who blessed the household so long as they kept the fire burning and pure, and would curse them if they did otherwise. Coulanges builds his case by following the clues remaining from the days of this worship - such as strange contradictions in the holy books, and rituals and hymns which did not reflect the beliefs but pointed to something more ancient. It is from these beliefs - alien and incomprehensible to us today - that the social order of the city was formed, and the laws that governed the cities written. Thus, we paradoxically find that the ancients were both completely foreign to us - and yet even we today preserve odd relics of this old belief. While Coulanges' seminal work, The Ancient City, is nowhere found in Nietzsche's library, and thus it is likely that Nietzsche never read it, it is indispensable for understanding the perspective of the ancient Hellenes. Since we're going to be covering a great deal of Hellenic thought in the coming episodes, we're going to preface all of it with a crash course in the development of their religious beliefs - for, as Coulanges argues, it is according to these beliefs that the political reality was shaped. Episode art: Dedication of a new Vestal Virgin, by Alessandro Marchesini (1663–1738), courtesy of Creative Commons