Laudator Temporis Acti

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. I (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd., 1926), pp. 334-335 (footnotes omitted):

Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis is the very antithesis of that enigmatic "Heimweh" of the Northerner which has something musical, soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as "Home" just what he could see from the Acropolis of his native city. Where the horizon of Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the "fatherland" of another began. Even the Roman of late Republican times understood by "patria" nothing but Urbs Roma, not even Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world, as it matured, dissolved itself into a large number of point-patriae, and the need of bodily separation between them took the form of hatreds far more intense than any hatred that there was of the Barbarian. And it is therefore the most convincing of all evidences of the victory of the Magian world-feeling that Caracalla in 212 A.D. granted Roman citizenship to all provincials. For this grant simply abolished the ancient, statuesque, idea of the citizen. There was now a Realm and consequently a new kind of membership.

[....]

Apollinian man, so long as he retained any effective remnant at all of his proper world-feeling, regarded "home" in the genuinely corporeal sense as the ground on which his city was built — a conception that recalls the "unity of place" of Attic tragedy and statuary. But to Magian man, to Christians, Persians, Jews, "Greeks," Manichaeans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, it means nothing that has any connexion with geographical actualities. And for ourselves it means an impalpable unity of nature, speech, climate, habits and history — not earth but "country," not point-like presence but historic past and future, not a unit made up of men, houses and gods but an idea, the idea that takes shape in the restless wanderings, the deep loneliness, and that ancient German impulse towards the South which has been the ruin of our best, from the Saxon Emperors to Hölderlin and Nietzsche.

Related post: Home.