The foundational text of Terran Humanism. A work that began as academic studies and ended as the philosophical seed of an empire.
No text produced by the New School travelled further, or did more damage, or inspired more genuine devotion than City of Man. Silvius Herminus Januarius intended it as a work of descriptive philosophy. What it became was a religion. And what that religion eventually became is a matter the archive records without pleasure.
During the Second Renaissance in New Athens, Greece, a great hunger for post-Space Age spirituality emerged in the first century BSC. The centuries preceding it had produced a polarisation: on one side, renewed fundamentalism in Old Earth religious traditions; on the other, the cold certainties of agnosticism and atheism. Neither satisfied the intuition that something real and numinous existed in the universe. Architecture had answered this for spacers — affirming many Old Earth religious concepts in terms suited to a spacefaring humanity. But Architecture was alien to the grounder temperament, which remained largely materialist. The spiritual question remained open for billions of Earth's citizens.
Silvius Herminus Januarius was a New School academic who noticed something hiding in plain sight: that an ancient Roman and syncretic archetypal pantheon had not died with the old religions. It had simply continued, quietly, in the habits and instincts of ordinary people — in the names they gave their children, the figures they hung in their homes, the oaths they half-remembered. He set out to study it. He wrote several academic papers. Then he collected and edited them into something anyone could read.
That was City of Man.
There is an unconscious, universally human urge to manifest divinity in a world of technology. This urge is not a delusion or a regression. It is evidence that divinity is metaphysically real — but that it originates in humanity, rather than humanity being a creation of an eternal divinity that preceded it.
It is therefore the task, and the right, of humanity to create its own divinities: consciously, deliberately, in accordance with the morals and virtues it wishes to embody. The Roman and syncretic names already in widespread intuitive use are the natural vocabulary for these archetypal forces. They are not arbitrary labels. They are the shape humanity has already given to its own divine productions.
Divinity proceeds from us. We are not its creation. We are its source.
Januarius did not merely assert this philosophically. He laid out its practical implications: a guiding ethic that was virtuous but explicitly pragmatic and materialistic, using the ancient Roman deities and their syncretic counterparts as the named faces of the human virtues they represent. The physical proximity of the planets to Earth served as a natural ordering principle — those closest to Earth carrying the greatest weight of human value.
Januarius presented the full Roman and syncretic pantheon — mapped, where possible, onto the solar system itself — as the living vocabulary of human divinity. These are not metaphors. Within Terran Humanist theology, they are real forces existing outside the physical plane, empowered by the collective psychic will of those who attend to them.
The works of City of Man became almost instantly popular among New School thinkers. Academic dissemination followed; official scholastic worship societies formed quickly from existing communities. And as the movement grew around him, Januarius came to regard himself as an incarnation of Hermes — the son of Jupiter and Maia, swift messenger, guide of souls.
City of Man is tagged in the Continuity Matrix as a Universal entry — its influence is not bounded by era. It shaped the spiritual landscape of Earth and the Inner System through the Foundation Period, the Standard Era, the Solar War, and beyond. What begins as a work of descriptive philosophy about what people already believe becomes, across the following centuries, the formal theological architecture of the Anthroperium's state religion.
Januarius argued that humanity has the right and the power to create its own divinities in its own image. The Anthroperium heard that argument and agreed — and the divinity they chose to create wore a face and a name and commanded an empire. Whether that is what Januarius intended, or the thing he made inevitable by writing what he wrote, is a question the archive cannot answer.
The Heliopolis — the great Terran Humanist temple complex near Mount Olympus in New Athens, housing shrines to the full pantheon in a mirror of the solar system — stood as the primary centre of worship for generations. It was burned and despoiled during the Battle of Earth in SY 135. The archive records this without editorialising. The fire is in the record.