INTRODUCTION.
The Necessity of Studying the Earliest Beliefs of the Ancients in Order to Understand
their Institutions.
It is proposed here to show upon what principles and by what rules Greek and Roman society
was governed.
We unite in the same study both the Greeks and the Romans, because these two peoples,
who were two branches of a single race, and who spoke
two idioms of a single language, also had the
same institutions and the same principles of government, and
passed through a series of similar revolutions.
We shall attempt to set in a clear light the radical
and essential differences which at all times distin-
guished these ancient peoples from modem societies.
In our system of education, we live from infancy in
the midst of the Greeks and Romans, and become accustomed continually to compare them with
ourselves, to judge of their history by our own, and
to explain our revolutions by theirs.
What we have received from them leads us to believe that we resemble
them.
We have some difficulty in considering them as foreign
nations; it is almost always ourselves that we
see in them.
Hence spring many errors.
We rarely fail to deceive ourselves regarding these
ancient nations when we see them through the opinions and
facts of our own time.
Now, errors of this kind are not without danger.
The ideas which the modems have had of Greece and
Rome have often been in their way.
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
modems has been put in peril.
The last eighty years have clearly shown that one of the great difficulties
which impede the march of modem society, is the
habit which it has of always keeping Greek and Roman
antiquity before its eyes.
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 modem
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 mles can never
govern humanity again.
Whence comes this ? Why are the conditions of
human government no longer the same as in earlier
times ? The great changes which appear from time to
time in the constitution of society can be the effect
neither of chance nor of force alone.
The cause which produces them must be powerful, and must be found in man himself.
If the laws of human association are no longer the same as
in antiquity, it is because there has been a
change in man.
There is, in fact, a part of our being which is modified
from age to age; this is our intelligence.
It is always in movement; almost always progressing; and
on this account, our institutions and our laws are
subject to change.
Man has not, in our day, the way of thinking that he had twenty-five centuries ago; and
this is why he is no longer governed as he was governed
then.
The history of Greece and Rome is a witness and
an example of the intimate relation which always exists
between men's ideas and their social state.
Examine the institutions of the ancients without thinking
of their religious notions, and you find them
obscure, whimsical, and inexplicable.
Why were there patricians and plebeians, patrons and clients, eupatrids
and thetes; and whence came the native and ineffaceable
differences which we find between these classes?
What was the meaning of those Lacedemonian institutions
which appear to us so contrary to nature?
How are we to explain those unjust caprices of ancient
private law; at Corinth and at Thebes, the sale of
land prohibited; at Athens and at Rome, an inequality in the
succession between brother and sister?
What did the jurists understand by agnation, and by gens?
Why those revolutions in the laws, those political
revolutions ? What was that singular patriotism which
sometimes effaced every natural sentiment?
What did they understand by that liberty of which they
were always talking?
How did it happen that institutions so very different from anything of which we
have an idea today, could become established and reign
for so long a time?
What is the superior principle which gave them authority over the minds of men?
But by the side of these institutions and laws place
the religious ideas of those times, and the facts at once
become clear, and their explanation is no longer doubtful.
On going back to the first ages of this race, —
that is to say, to the time when its institutions were
founded, — we observe the idea which it had of human
existence, of life, of death, of a second life, of the divine
principle, we perceive a close relation between these
opinions and the ancient rules of private law; between
the rites which spring from these opinions and their
political institutions.
A comparison of beliefs and laws shows that a primi-
tive religion constituted the Greek and Roman family,
established marriage and paternal authority, fixed the
order of relationship, and consecrated the right of
property, and the right of inheritance.
This same re- ligion, after having enlarged and extended
the family, formed a still larger association, the city,
and reigned in that as it had reigned in the family.
From it came all the institutions, as well as all the private
law, of the ancients.
It was from this that the city received all its principles, its rules, its usages, and
its ma^stracies.
But, in the course of time, this ancient religion became
modified or efiac^, and private law and political in-
stitutions were modified with it.
Then came a series of revolutions, and social changes regularly
followed the development of knowledge.
It is of the first importance, therefore, to study the
religious ideas of these peoples, and the oldest are the
most important for us to know.
For the institutions and beliefs which we find at the flourishing
periods of Greece and Rome are only the development of
those of an earlier age; we mast seek the roots
of them in the very distant past.
The Greek and Italian populations are many centuries older than Romulus and
Homer.
It was at an epoch more ancient, in an antiquity without date, that their beliefs were formed,
and that their institutions were either established or prepared.
But what hope is there of arriving at a knowledge of this distant past?
Who can tell us what men thought ten or fifteen centuries before our
era ? Can we recover what is so intangible and fugitive
— beliefs and opinions?
We know what the Aryas of the East thought thirty-five centuries ago: we learn
this from the hymns of the Vedas, which are certainly
very ancient, and from the laws of Manu, in which
we can distinguish passages that are of an extremely
early date.
But where are the hymns of the ancient Hellenes?
They, as well as the Italians, had ancient hymns, and
old sacred books; but nothing of these has come down
to us.
What tradition can remain to us of those generations that have not left us a single written line?
Fortunately, the past never completely dies for man.
Man may forget it, but he always preserves it within
him.
For, take him at any epoch, and he is the product,
the epitome, of all the earlier epochs.
Let him look into his own soul, and he can find and distinguish
these different epochs by what each of them has left
within him.
Let us observe the Greeks of the age of Pericles, and
the Romans of Cicero’s time; they carry within them
the authentic marks and the unmistakable vestiges of
the most remote ages.
The contemporary of Cicero (I speak especially of the man of the people)
has an imagination full of legends; these legends
come to him from a very early time, and they bear witness
to the manner of thinking of that time.
The contemporary of Cicero speaks a language whose roots are very
ancient; this language, in expressing the thoughts
of ancient ages, has been modelled upon them, and it
has kept the impression, and transmits it from century
to century.
The primary sense of a root will sometimes reveal an
ancient opinion or an ancient usage; ideas have been
transformed, and the recollections of them have vanished;
but the words have remained, inunutable witnesses of beliefs that have disappeared.
The contemporary of Cicero practised rites in the
sacrifices, at funerals, and in the ceremony of marriage;
these rites were older than his time, and what proves it
is, that they did not correspond to his religious belief.
But if we examine the rites which he observed, or the
formulas which he recited, we find the marks of what
men believed fifteen or twenty centuries earlier.