I just finished The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. What a remarkable book! I found it thanks to Marc Andreessen’s recommendation.

While I didn’t make notes while reading it, the following points stand out in my mind.

• The ancient religion, and how it completely ruled over everyone’s minds. How it was centered on a small domestic hearth, and how it even made slaves out of the heads of the families (not to mention everyone else).
• How the cities evolved as confederations of families, by transposition of the cult into a larger whole, where the center of the city became its hearth.
• How rights were gradually expanded.
• The constant war of classes between the rich (supporting liberty) and the poor (supporting equality). How these expressed themselves as cycles of democracy and tyranny. How early the war between classes started.
• How Rome was that city that overcame all other cities, conquered, and finally stopped being a traditional city itself. Its mixed origins, its accumulation of cults, assimilation of foreign elites, and its gradual granting of citizenship. How it was always aristocratic.
• The final chapter on Christianity is the best of the book. How Christianity is virtually the opposite of every ancient religion: open to every human, openly taught rather than secretive, preaching equality among everyone, promoting the love (not fear) of God, sharply distinguishing the spiritual from the political and emphasizing the former over the latter. How this separation of religion and state, together with previous philosophical thought, became the spring of individual freedom.

One more thing. The book seems to accelerate very intensely towards the end. It seems to follow, in its description, the speed of the processes it describes. Very slow and permanent in the beginning, at some point picking up the tempo and ending up in overlapping waves of transformation. In its speed, the book seems to be self-similar with its subject.