The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Illustrated)

It is ironic, given the injustices of humanistic law, that men declare God’s law to be “barbaric” and “primitive” and affirm the validity of modern humanistic law. Greek law was brutal towards all save the limited number of elite, and Greek society was a slave society in which the elite few regarded their will as justice. The idealization of the Gr

There are a few glimpses of this in the story of Romulus. As well as dedicating the Temple of Jupiter Stator, he consulted the gods in deciding where exactly to found the new city: it was partly a disagreement about how to interpret the divine signs, observed in the flight of some birds, that led to the fatal quarrel between Romulus and Remus. But

Government decisions, particularly those related to war, were never undertaken without consulting the appropriate deities first. This was done through various methods of divination, including dream interpretation, observing animal behavior (in particular the flight patterns of birds), and “scrying” from the entrails of animal sacrifices.

In Greece, Pagan culture gave birth to the concepts of democracy, rational philosophy, public libraries, theatre and the Olympic Games, creating a blueprint for our modern world. What was the spirituality that inspired these momentous cultural achievements?