Three brief chapters of The Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) capture some the book’s important ideas about the composition of ancient polytheism, and how the universal benevolence of Christianity’s monotheistic gospel would in time spell a new world. “[T]o obey Cæsar is no longer the same thing as to obey God.” The book, originally in French, was first published in 1864. In a foreword to the selection, Fustel de Coulanges’s book is related to Larry Siedentop’s book Inventing the Individual: Origins of Western Liberalism.