To the modern mind, the past often appears as a simpler, more traditional version of the present. We look back upon the grand procession of history and see societies that were less technologically advanced, less scientifically enlightened, and less politically sophisticated than our own. We tend to view our ancestors through a mirror, seeing in their lives and beliefs a distorted reflection of ourselves - our own concepts of law, family, politics, and faith, merely in an embryonic or unenlightened state. This perspective, however, is a consistent illusion. The past is a window onto a landscape so foreign that it requires a deliberate and difficult shift in perspective to truly picture it.[1]
The most potentially misleading concept we carry into this landscape is the word "religion." It seems a simple, universal category, a natural component of human experience. However, treating it as a discrete sphere of private belief, neatly separable from politics, science, or family life, is a habit formed only recently in the span of human history. The ancients did not view "religion" as a standalone institution or a private identity option. To them, the sacred was not a part of life; it was the atmosphere in which life took place. It was the air they breathed, the law they followed, the time they inhabited, and the physics that governed the harvest.
What we call religion was, in pre-modern times, more akin to our concepts of 'culture' or 'the law' or way of life - an all-encompassing framework that held society together. While distinctions existed - Romans distinguished religio (proper obligation) from superstitio (excessive fear) - these were internal calibrations within a sacred worldview, not boundaries between a religious world and a secular one.
This cognitive dissonance we feel when looking back is partly because our modern definition of truth has narrowed. As the historian Paul Veyne argued, the ancients operated with a "plurality of truths." They did not possess a single, unified field of "belief" that applied universally, but rather moved fluidly between different truth programs. A myth could be meaningfully true in the context of a civic ritual, demonstrably false in a philosophical debate about nature, and allegorically useful in literature - all at the same time. They did not need to partition their world because they possessed a cognitive flexibility that allowed for multiple, overlapping realities. We, having lost this capacity, project our binary need for "fact or fiction" onto a world that never operated by those rules. To understand the origins of our current crisis of meaning, we must excavate the layers of modern assumption that obscure this integrated world. The most formidable of these layers is the concept of the "secular" itself.
This partition was largely an intellectual project of the Enlightenment, born from the chaos of the 17th-century wars of religion. Faced with the bloody aftermath of doctrinal conflict, thinkers sought a new way to organize society that would prevent theological disputes from tearing the state apart. They needed an analytical category that would allow them to separate the sphere of "belief" from the spheres of politics and commerce. This was a political project, aimed at neutralizing the explosive power of sacred claims.
Key figures like David Hume and Voltaire were instrumental in this reframing. Hume treated belief not as a revealed truth but as a psychological phenomenon, arguing that "religion" arose from human passions like hope and fear rather than from rational observation of the cosmos. Voltaire, meanwhile, championed tolerance from a pragmatic standpoint, famously observing that a society with one religion would suffer tyranny, but one with thirty - like the London Stock Exchange - would live in peace. For them, the solution was to cordon off belief into a private, voluntary sphere where it could be practiced without disrupting the public order.
The result was the invention of the "secular" as a distinct domain of life - government, law, markets - supposedly free from religious authority. But in creating the secular, they simultaneously created "religion" as its opposite: a bounded, private category of individual conviction. This division, so fundamental to the modern Western mind that we take it for granted, is the very structure that makes the pre-modern world incomprehensible.
As we step back into the archaic city-states of Greece and early Rome, the modern category of "religion" dissolves. Here, we encounter a society where the sacred was not a system of belief one could choose, but the indivisible substance of family, law, and politics - the very DNA of social existence.
The historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges argued that the ancient city was born from the domestic cult of the hearth and ancestors.[2] The true center of the ancient world was not the public temple but the family home (domus). Within each home burned a sacred fire - a living divinity protecting the household. The dead were not gone; they were divine powers who demanded perpetual worship.
It was a relationship of terrifying obligation. The ancestors were powerful, jealous, and demanding entities. If the rites were neglected, if the food offerings ceased, the benevolent ancestors would transform into malevolent spirits - the lemures or larvae - who would haunt the living. Thus, the primary duty of the living was not self-actualization or happiness, but the maintenance of the ancestral cult. The paterfamilias (the head of the household) was not just a father; he was the high priest of this domestic religion, holding the power of life and death over his family, a dominance justified by the belief that he alone stood between them and the wrath of the dead.
From this foundation, all other aspects of ancient society flowed. Law was not a secular code but a set of sacred rules derived from this ancestral cult. In this world, there were no "non-sacred" rules. Property, for instance, was not a commodity to be bought and sold on a market; a parcel of land was inextricably linked to the family tomb located upon it. To sell the land would be an act of grave sacrilege, an abandonment of one's divine lineage. The land belonged to the family in perpetuity because it belonged to the family's gods.
Citizenship operated on the same exclusive logic. It was not a matter of residence or legal status in the modern sense, but a birthright into this web of ancestral cults. The city itself was a federation of these sacred families, united by a common civic hearth. To be excluded from the public rites was to be stripped of citizenship, to become a non-person with no place in the social or cosmic order. This explains the ferocity of early political struggles, like the conflict between Patricians and Plebeians in Rome. The Plebeians were fighting for more than voting rights; they were fighting for sacred rights - the right to have auspices, to consult the gods, to have a valid marriage. Without these, they were effectively metaphysically illegitimate.
This "heavy" system—inextricably bound to physical locations and biological lineage—provided a high degree of stability, though at the cost of individual flexibility. It endured for millennia because it offered a robust solution to the fundamental human problem of predictability and coordination.
In these "high-context" societies, social prediction was relatively simple. You did not need to decipher the hidden intentions of a stranger; you only dealt with kin or those bound by the same visible rites. The shared "tangible reality" of the hearth and the tomb acted as a guarantee of behavior. Reliability was not something that had to be constantly negotiated between individuals; it was structural, baked into the landscape and the lineage.