…there is one essential difference between the ancient ideas developed in Athens and Rome, and the modern Western idea. In the ancient world, the family, rather than the individual, constituted the smallest unit of any society. For Aristotle the fact that “man is by nature a political animal” is demonstrated by the natural tendency of men and women to form households. The extended family (oikos) is a natural human society and, in Aristotle’s view, an inherently hierarchical one. Larger political communities are not strictly natural, but cultural: they arise through a process of social development. Households form villages, and villages form the polis, the complete and self-sufficient political community. The household is thus the cellular unit of any social organism: by reproducing itself from one generation to the next, it enables the community itself to endure and potentially to achieve a form of collective immortality.
By contrast, the democratic ideal that came to shape the modern West asserts the ontological primacy of the mortal individual, seen as a complete and autonomous political subject, regardless of his genetic origin or family situation. In the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, there is nothing between the individual and the nation. When its first article declares that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” “men” are understood as individuals, abstracted from their particular family or communal affiliations. Ernest Renan, that great admirer of classical Greece, once defined the Civil Code produced by the Revolution as “a code of laws that seems to have been made for an ideal citizen who was born a foundling and died unmarried.”[1]
The difference is anthropological: it proceeds from the fundamental level of how human beings define themselves. Ancient Greeks and Romans, like most people in Antiquity, conceived of themselves as genealogical beings, participants in an unbroken chain of generations. An individual’s identity and social worth were inseparable from his lineage, from the blood that connected him/her to his/her ancestors and descendants. Man is mortal; what can endure beyond his death is the continuity of his lineage. The Greeks and Romans had several concepts of the afterlife, but individual survival beyond death was often subordinated to the family’s continuity through successive generations. A good afterlife begins with your ancestors welcoming you home.
The Christian Antigenealogical Experiment
