Sublime

Neither interest, nor agreement, nor habit creates the social bond; it is this holy communion piously accomplished in the presence of the gods of the city.

La formation des sociétés historiques au Moyen-Orient, en Inde, en Chine, au Mexique, au Pérou constitue une métamorphose à partir d’un agrégat de sociétés archaïques de chasseurs-cueilleurs. Cette métamorphose a produit les villes, l’État, les classes sociales, la spécialisation du travail, les grandes religions, l’architecture, les arts, la

The family, therefore, had a common tomb, where its members, one after another, must come to sleep. For this tomb the rule was the same as for the hearth. It was no more permitted to unite two families in the same tomb than it was to establish two domestic hearths in the same house. To bury one out of the family tomb, or to place a stranger in this

The nature of government was also changed. Its essential function was no longer the regular performance of religious ceremonies. It was especially constituted to maintain order and peace within and dignity and power without.

We may still see vestiges of it in an ancient law of Athens, which declared that to be a citizen one must have a domestic god.457

At the foot of the hill was found an agglomeralion of houses, which were built without any religious ceremony, and without a sacred enclosure. These were the dwellings of the plebeians, who could not live in the sacred city.

The belief of primitive ages, as we find it in the Vedas, and as we find vestiges of it in all Greek and Roman law, was that the reproductive power resided exclusively in the father. The father alone possessed the mysterious principle of existence, and transmitted the spark of life.

Solon had maintained the republican forms; now the people still entertained a blind hatred against these forms of government under which they had seen, for four centuries, nothing but the reign of the aristocracy. After the example of many Greek cities, they wished for a tyrant.

The same revolution, under forms slightly varied, took place at Athens, at Sparta, at Rome, in all the cities, in fine, whose history is known to us. Everywhere it was the work of the aristocracy; everywhere it resulted in suppressing political royalty and continuing religious royalty.