Earlier lectures of this course have dealt with topics suggested by
the first civilization of the Aegean, by the first literature of the
Greeks, and by the survival in Graeco-Roman culture of traces of a
quite unhellenic barbarism.
To-day we come to the fifth century and to the work of the man who
stands next after Homer as exponent, on a generous scale, of his
country’s thought and life. Homer has shown us Aegean life in a lull
between the storms of the Age of Wanderings, between the Achaean and
the Dorian Migrations. Herodotus shows us adolescent Greece, the child
of Earth and Planet, strangling, like Heracles, the snakes about its
cradle, and rising thence to strike down Giants and Monsters, and to
enter into its kingdom. This kingdom, for him, is nothing less than
the περίοδος γῆς, the _orbis terrarum_, a rim of convergent coastlands
encircling the Midland Sea, which is ‘Our Sea’.
But there is this difference between Homer and Herodotus, when we see
them from our present point of view. Homer, and to a great extent the
post-Homeric Epic, sang of the world in sheer delight of its objective
goodness. Their contribution to anthropological science is the picture
which they have given of the world as they saw it and lived in it. The
contribution of anthropology to them is an interpretation of that
picture based on comparative study of other worlds than theirs. With
Herodotus, too, what first strikes the eye of the anthropological
reader is the wealth of detail about the manners and customs of Greeks
and their neighbours, a collection unrivalled in Greek literature
before the Roman Age in extent and variety, and quite unique in its
quality. And for Herodotus, too, the first duty of anthropology is to
interpret his picture of mankind; to illustrate by parallel cases;
to extract by comparison the genuine observation from the blundered
folk-tale commentary; to fill the blanks in the picture itself with
such fragments of fifth-century knowledge as have been preserved
in other hands than his. To do this adequately would require many
lectures, even were his picture of ancient life far more complete than
it is; and in the fragmentary state in which Herodotus has transmitted
our share of his knowledge, the commentator’s difficulty is increased
manifold. A sketch of a single custom, a casual footnote to a footnote
of apparently disjointed matter, may well need a monograph to itself. I
need only instance, for an Oxford public, the two Herodotean papers in
last year’s _Anthropological Essays presented to Edward Burnett Tylor_.
To this extent Herodotus falls into line with Homer as the subject
of lectures like these; but in proportion as he is regarded so, he
falls for this practical reason wholly beyond their scope. But there
is another aspect of Herodotean anthropology, which is almost wholly
absent from Homeric, and is only partially present even in Hesiodic.
Between Homer and Herodotus, Greek Reason has come into the world.
After Homer, Greek literature, whether poetry or prose, has its
subjective, its reflective side. Man has become the measure of all
things; and things are worth observing and recording--they become
ἀξιαπήγητα, θέας ἄξια or the reverse, according as they do, or do not,
amplify human knowledge already acquired, or prompt or guide human
attempts to classify and interpret them. In this high meaning of the
word all Greek thought and records are utilitarian, relative to an end
in view: and this end is ever anthropocentric, it is nothing less, but
it is also nothing more, than the Good Life, the Wellbeing of Mankind.
On this broad ground, pre-Socratic and Socratic thought are at one,
alike Hellenic in spirit, because alike utilitarian. ‘It is not for
this that I speculate,’ said Thales, when he ‘struck oil’. It was
precisely for this, to make philosophy useful, that Socrates brought it
from heaven down to earth.
So what is proposed, in this lecture, is to attempt an answer to the
question, How far was a science of anthropology, in the sense in which
we understand it, contemplated as possible in the Great Age of Greece?
What were the principles on which it rested? How far had Herodotus and
his contemporaries gone in the way of realizing their conceptions of
such a science? And what were the causes, external to the study itself,
which helped or hindered their realization of it?
It will be clear, I think, from the outset, that this inquiry has
nothing to do with the question whether this or that observation on
the part of Herodotus was accurately made or not. The only way in
which Herodotean error or ‘malignity’ will concern us at all is if the
sources of an error can be so far exposed as to betray what he
was thinking about when he made it. For there are two kinds of
anthropologists, as there are two kinds of workers in every department
of knowledge. But in a science which is still in so infantile a stage
as ours, there is more than common distinctness between them.
There is an anthropologist to whom we go for our facts: the painful
accurate observer of data, the storehouse of infinite detail; sometimes
himself the traveller and explorer, by cunning speech or wiser silence
opening the secrets of aboriginal hearts; sometimes the middleman,
the broker of traveller’s winnings, insatiate after some new thing,
unerring by instinct rather than by experience, to detect false coin,
to disinter the pearl of great price, βιβλιοθήκη τις ἔμψυχος καὶ
περιπατοῦν μουσεῖον. To him we go for our facts. His views may matter
little; his great book may be put together upon whatever ephemeral
hypothesis he may choose. We learn his doctrine as we master the method
of an index; it will guide us, more or less securely, to the data we
want; but it is the document in the footnote that we are looking for,
and the compiler’s voucher (express or implicit) that in his judgement
‘this is evidence’.
And there is an anthropologist to whom we look for our light. His
learning may be fragmentary, as some men count learning; his memory
faulty; his inaccuracy beyond dispute; his inconsistency the one
consistent thing about him. But with shattered and rickety instruments
he attains results; heedless of epicycles, disrespectful to the
equator, he bequeaths his paradoxes to be demonstrated by another
generation of men. He may not know, or reason, perhaps; but he has
learnt to see; and what he sees he says. For he too is a μουσεῖον--only
in another sense--a Walking Tabernacle of the Nine.[64]
There have been anthropologists, in our own time and before, who have
come near to combine both excellences: and in none perhaps are they
wholly severed. Least of all do we expect to find both wholly present
or wholly absent, in one who has in a sense fallen into anthropology
by an accident; and created one science, while he pursued another art.
In the Greek compiler who made this ‘the plan of his researches, to
procure that human acts should not be obliterated by time, and that
great deeds, wrought some by the Greeks, some by men of other speech,
should not come to lose their fame’, we cannot but see a man who
_meant_--with good or ill success--to be in the best sense ‘a mine of
information’. But it is the same Herodotus who put it before him in his
title-page ‘to discover, besides, the reason why they fought with one
another’; and that is why we hail him Father of Anthropology, no less
than the Father of History.
Either Herodotus knew himself to be hewing out a new avenue of
knowledge, a new vista across the world; or he knew himself to be
speaking to an audience of men who themselves were ἀνθρωπολόγοι. That
is the alternative, for those who are moved to deny his originality. If
Herodotus was not in advance of his age, then his age was abreast of
Herodotus. It becomes, therefore, our first duty to ask what evidence
we possess as to the phase in which the fifth century held in mind the
problems which for us are anthropological. Now apart from the
Tragedians and Pindar, Herodotus, as we know to our discomfiture, is
the only pre-Socratic _thinker_ whose works have been preserved in
bulk: and even his, as we are well assured, are preserved only in
_bulk_, not in their entirety. So even the sceptic is driven back upon
the alternative, either of arguing from silence and _lacunae_, or of
disproving the originality of Herodotus from his very proficiency in
the subject.
But what can we learn of the state of anthropological knowledge in the
days before Herodotus wrote?
The task of the anthropologist is, in its essence, to find an answer to
these principal questions:--What is Man? What kinds of Men are there?
and how and by what agencies are they formed, and distributed over the
lands, as we find them? How is human life propagated under parental
sanction, maintained by social institutions, and made tolerable by
useful arts? And what part, if any, do either ἀνάγκη or λόγος or τύχη
play in defining these processes, and the general career of Mankind as
an animal species?
Problems such as these were bound to present themselves sooner or
later to so reasonable a people as the Greeks. There is no doubt that
they were already so familiar, in the fourth century, as to be almost
obsolete _as problems_. Otherwise we should find more importance
attached to them in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The question
before us now is rather, how early did they present themselves; what
methods were applied to deal with them; and how far had Greek thought
gone towards a solution, when Socrates stepped down from his
Cloud-basket, and substituted psychology as the proper study of Mankind?
To those who are familiar with the early phases of Greek physical
inquiry, it is needless to repeat in detail how closely this movement
was bound up, in its origin, with that great exploratory movement which
littered the shores of the Mediterranean, from Tarsus to Tartessus,
and from the Tanais to the Nile, with Greek factories and settlements,
and brought all climates, lands, and varieties of men within the
scope of one encyclopaedic vision; how the compilers of ‘Circuits
of the World’ had surveyed all shores of ‘their own Sea’; how the
specialists had treated ‘Air, Water, and Places’ (if I may antedate
the later catch-title) in accordance with the principles of their
respective sciences; and how, on the other limit of knowledge, Milesian
chronologers and astronomers--the latter with no small glimpses into
the storehouse of Babylonian observation--had begun to make just
such maps of all time human and geological as Milesian cartographers
were making of ‘all the sea and all the rivers’. Can we doubt that,
in a movement of national inquiry, of this intensity and scope, the
question was raised of the origin, the distribution, and the modes of
subsistence of Man?
Direct evidence of the existence of an Ionian anthropology has evaded
us for the most part. Yet, earlier still, we have the proof that
something of the kind was stirring. Hesiod presents us already with
a standard scheme of archaeology in which Ages of Gold, Silver, and
Bronze succeed each other, classified by their respective artefacts,
and succeeded, first by an Age of Heroes--an anomaly, partly of Homeric
authority, partly genuine tradition of the Sea Raids and the Minoan
_débâcle_--and then by an Age of Iron. More than this, the observation
that primitive Man was a forest-dweller, who grew no corn, and
subsisted on acorns and beech mast, presumes observation, and inference
besides, which were perhaps obvious enough among men of the Balkan
fringe, ancient and modern; but at the same time betrays a reasonable
interest, and an eye for essentials, which are far beyond the average
of archaic or barbarian speculation as to human origins.
Some fragments indeed of this pre-Socratic anthropology have come
down to us directly; and, wherever they have done so, they show the
same curious combination of folk-lore with mature insight, as do the
views about non-human nature which are assigned to the same school.
The belief, for example,[65] that human beings originated not by animal
procreation, but by the operation of trees and rocks on women passing
by, hardly differs in kind from the beliefs imputed to the Arunta; and
the Hesiodic belief[66] that the men of Aegina were descended from ants,
or men in general from stones dropped by Deucalion and Pyrrha,[67] to
totemic beliefs or survivals. But the views ascribed to Anaximander,
and later to Archelaus, both of Miletus, show something very far in
advance of mere folk-lore. The lower animals were commonly believed to
have been produced by spontaneous generation, the effect of the sun’s
heat on moist earth, slime, or sea water. Anaximander added the
descriptive generalization,[68] based on observations on the shores of
the sea about Miletus and the Maeander silt, that these lower forms
began their cycle of existence ‘encysted in prickly integuments, and
then at maturity came out upon drier ground and shed their shells;
but still went on living for a short while’. The older belief, as we
have seen, was that men too originated in this way, either directly or
from some invertebrate form, like the ants of Aegina. But Anaximander
pointed out an obvious difficulty, and supplied also a solution of it.
‘Man,’ he said,[69] ‘was produced in the first instance from animals of
a different sort’; and this he argued ‘from the fact that the other
animals soon get their food for themselves, and Man alone needs a long
period of nursing: for which very reason, a creature of this sort could
not possibly have survived’. Here we must note first that a special
creation of human beings ready made and mature, as Hebrew thinkers
conjectured, and Greek poets had devised in the case of Pandora, was
unthinkable to an Ionian naturalist, and merely does not come into
question; secondly, that a special creation of human beings in infancy
is equally ruled out by the fact of the long helplessness of the human
infant; thirdly, that the inevitable alternative is accepted without a
hint of hesitation, namely, that Mankind must have developed from some
other kind of animal, which, though not human, could and did fend for
its young during such an infancy as Man’s. Only unacquaintance with the
great apes of the tropical world, and very imperfect acquaintance even
with imported monkeys, can have prevented Anaximander from assigning
to Man his proper place in an evolutionary Order of _Primates_. The
other half of our knowledge of Anaximander’s anthropology is even more
instructive. ‘It is clear,’ he says,[70] ‘that men were first produced
within fishes, and nourished like the “mud fish”--τραφέντας ὤσπερ
οἱ πηλαῖοι; and, when they were competent to fend for themselves,
were thereupon cast on shore (or perhaps “hatched out”) and took to
the land.’ Our knowledge of the πηλαῖοι is limited; but the parallel
passage throws some light on Anaximander’s theory. ‘The animals came
into existence by a process of evaporation by the sun; but man came
into existence in the likeness of another animal, namely, a fish, to
begin with.’ Here the theory is, clearly, that there was a stage in
the evolution of Man when he ceased to conform to the type even of the
highest of marine animals; and it was in the guise of some kind of
fish that he took to the land. It is not so clear whether we have here
merely the conjecture that at some stage marine vertebrates took the
crucial step and invaded the dry land; or whether, also, the similitude
of the ‘mud-fish’ is used to report observations which are familiar
enough to embryologists now, and in the fifth century were no less
familiar to Hippocrates.[71] In any case the views in points of detail
which are reported as characteristic of Anaximander presuppose an
almost Darwinian outlook on the animal kingdom, and an understanding
of comparative anatomy, which hardly becomes possible again before the
Renaissance.
No less striking is the testimony of the fragment of Archelaus,[72] one
of the immediate teachers of Socrates, to the same evolutionary view.
‘Concerning animals he said that when the earth became warm in the
beginning in its lower part, where the hot and the cold were mixed,
there came to light the rest of the animals, of many dissimilar kinds,
but all with the same mode of life, maintained of the slime; and they
were short-lived. But, afterwards, interbreeding occurred among these,
and men were separated off from the rest, and they constituted leaders
and customs and arts and cities and so forth. And, he says, reason
is implanted in all animals alike; for each uses it according to his
bodily frame, one more tardily, another more promptly.’ Here again
we have the biological theory of evolution in a most explicit form,
with the same distinction as in Anaximander between the short-lived,
infusorian, almost amorphous fauna of sun-warmed water or slime, and
the higher orders of thinking vertebrates, among whom Man stands merely
as an exceptionally rational species.
After this, it is almost needless to note that the physical
anthropology of the Greeks was quite unimpeded by those literary
misconceptions which so long retarded the study of Man in the modern
world. Hecataeus, indeed, had at one time been misled by the shortness
of Greek pedigrees; but his Egyptian researches gave him in good time
the larger perspective,[73] as even his critic Herodotus admits. And
the first reporter of the fact that Egypt is the ‘gift of the Nile’
can hardly have failed to see the bearing of this piece of geology
upon the question of the antiquity of Man. Herodotus, at all events,
has no illusions.[74] Achelous and other rivers are there to show that
the Nile is no freak of nature; time future can be postulated to the
extent of twenty thousand years; and time past may be measured on the
same scale, for the perfecting of the Nile’s gift, not to mention the
further periods required for the deposit of the shells in the Pyramid
limestone.[75] More explicitly still, he is prepared to allow indefinite
time for the development and dissemination of human varieties. _How_
the Danubian Sigynnae came to be colonists of the Medes, he is not
prepared to say; but the thing itself is not in his view impossible.
γένοιτο δ’ ἂν πᾶν ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῳ.[76]
It is at this point in our story that we must look at the evidence of
Aeschylus. Small as is that portion of his works which has come down to
us, it is of high value, both as a record of current knowledge, and as
an indication of the contemporary phases of theory. Already we have the
elements of the later threefold division of the anthropological horizon
corresponding essentially with the tri-continental scheme of the
geographers, with which we know from a fragment of _Prometheus Solutus_
that Aeschylus was acquainted at a stage of its development, which the
quotation fixes for us precisely.[77] Ethnologically, the ἐσχατιαί are
as follows:--Northwards, are found the Hyperboreans.[78] Eastwards,
lie the Indians; they are camel-riding nomads, and live next to the
Aethiopians.[79] Southward come the Aethiopians proper,[80] with Egypt,
the gift of the Nile,[81] and Libya. The black skin of the Aethiopians
is sun-tanned.[82] Aethiopia embraces everything from the φοινικόπεδον
ἐρυθρᾶς ἲερὸν χεῦμα θαλάσσης to the χαλκοκέραυνον παρ’ Ὠκεανῷ λίμναν
παντοτρόφον Αἰθιόπων where the Sun rests his horses;[83] that is,
from the southern margin of Asia (where the Indians live) to the far
South-West. In front of the Aethiopians lie the Libyans; in front of
the Indians the Empire of Persia (for there are no Indians in the
_Persae_, and Bactria is the remotest province); in front of the
Hyperboreans, the Scythians, the Abioi of Homer, and the Arimaspi; all
nomad pastoral peoples.
At the margin of ethnological Man, sometimes merely unisexual,
sometimes misanthrope, stand the Amazons: in the _Supplices_ they
seem to stand for the North,[84] and they lie beyond Caucasus in
the _Prometheus_;[85] beyond that margin, there are the one-eyed,
breast-eyed, and dog-headed tribes of Hesiod and of common report.
Hesiodic too, in its main outlines, is the sketch of primitive Man in
the _Prometheus_, with its hint of spontaneous generation[86] and its
fourfold scheme of useful metals.
But for Aeschylus the tribes of men are sundered rather by culture than
by race. The two women in Atossa’s dream are like sisters in form and
figure; it is by their dress that she knows one of them to be Persian,
the other Greek.[87] So, too, the king in the _Supplices_[88] knows the
Danaid chorus for foreign women by their dress. They might be Amazons,
for there are no men with them; but no! they carry no bows.[89] Stay!
they _do_ carry κλάδοι: that surely is Greek.[90] μόνον τὁδ’ Ὲλλὰς χθὼν
συνοίσεται στόχῳ. Only in the second place comes language, to decide in
a case where dress and accessories are indecisive;[91] and only when the
Danaids assure him that they are really Argive, and of his own kin, are
new doubts raised by their build and complexion,[92] and he questions
again whether they are Libyans (with the Nile and the Κύπριος χαρακτήρ
thrown in, for the aesthetic types of Egyptian and Graeco-Assyrian
art), or Indians, or Amazons; outlanders, that is, of the South, the
East, or the North, as we have seen.
These preliminary notes have been designed to give such retrospect over
the course of Greek anthropological theory as our fragmentary sources
allow: but they have been enough, I hope, to show where matters stood
in the lifetime of Herodotus, and also to some degree what the burning
questions--or some of them--were. Now we come to Herodotus himself, to
take the elements of his anthropology in similar order, and put them
into their respective places.
First then, Herodotus gives us for the first time a reasoned scheme
of ethnological criteria; and it marks at once an advance on that of
Aeschylus, and an important modification of it. In the famous passage
where the Athenians reject the proposals of Alexander of Macedon,
and against immense inducements refuse to desert the Greek cause,
they state as their inducement the fourfold bond which holds a nation
together. ‘Greece,’ they reply,[93] ‘is of one blood; and of one speech;
and has dwelling-places of gods in common, and sacrifices to them; and
habits of similar customs’: and that is why the Athenians cannot betray
their nation. Common descent, common language, common religion, and
common culture: these are the four things which make a nation one; and,
conversely, the things which, if unconformable, hold nations apart. To
this analysis, modern ethnology has little or nothing to add. It might
be said, as Professor Flinders Petrie has suggested,[94] that identity
of religious beliefs is in the last resort only a peculiarly refined
test of conformity of behaviour between man and man; and that community
of culture, beyond dumb interchange of artefacts, is inconceivable
without community of speech. But the mode of propagation, both of
language and of religious observance, differs so greatly in kind
from that of the transmission of material culture, that the forcible
reduction of the four criteria of Herodotus to the two major criteria
of Physique and Culture fails us in practice almost as soon as it
is made. So far as Herodotus presents us with an ordered scheme of
anthropological thought--with a science of anthropology, in fact--he is
little, if at all, behind the best thought of our own day.
It is not, I think, pressing his language too far, if we regard him as
stating these four criteria in what he regarded as the order of their
relative importance. First, for scientific as for political purposes,
comes community of descent; next, community of language; then community
of religion; and general community of observance, in daily life, only
at the end of all. Contrast with this the method of inquiry in the
_Supplices_, where, as we saw, dress and equipment come first, then
religious observance, then language; and physique is postponed to all
three. That this is not accidental will be seen, I think, from an
example of the Herodotean anthropology when applied, so to speak, ‘in
the field,’ to the description of the northern Argippaei where each
successive criterion is introduced by δὲ which is adversative to the
preceding clause.[95] Here the physical anthropology is given first;
then the language, which distinguishes these Argippaei from _all_ other
men, and so forms a cross division athwart the criterion of physique;
then, _though_ they have a language of their own, yet, till they speak
to you, you would not think it, for their dress is Scythian; but after
all, Scythians they cannot be, because no Scythian lives on tree-fruit.
He is a pastoral nomad, or at best an ἀροτὴρ ἐπὶ πρήσι. Here ἤθεα
ὁμότροπα hold the last and lowest place; and the cause of this is
plain: for their witness agrees not together.
There is a reason for this new emphasis on community of blood and of
language in the anthropology of Herodotus. If the Persian War had shown
nothing else, it had shown the superior efficiency of an army which was
mutually intelligible, over one which might have met, not in Kritalla,
but in Shinar; and even more forcibly it had impressed the belief,
that what mattered was not equipment, nor language, but breed. It was
the Persians who could survey and mark a sea channel like a modern
Admiralty,[96] and amazed their captive by those unfamiliar drugs and
‘shield-straps made of silky linen’ which we call surgical bandages;[97]
but it was their prisoner Pytheus who amazed them by the physique and
the training which brought him through, when he was literally ‘mangled
to butcher’s meat’.
And there is another reason for this emphasis. Right in sight of
Halicarnassus, and hardly two hours’ sail, lies the town of Cos, and
in its _agora_ to-day stands the great plane-tree of Hippocrates; and
during the lifetime of Herodotus there was growing up there that latest
and fairest flower of pre-Socratic knowledge, the Coan medical school,
with an anatomy, a physiology, and an anthropology of its own, superior
by far to anything which succeeded it until the seventeenth century.
In what relation the professional science of Hippocrates stood to
the penumbral knowledge of Herodotus, and also to the learning and
speculations of their predecessors, may be illustrated from their
respective treatment of the phenomenon of beardlessness in Man.
All Mediterranean peoples, and all sedentary peoples of the European
mainland, agree in this, that their adult males have copious hair upon
the face. Herodotus and his contemporaries had no means of foreseeing
that this was really the exception rather than the rule among human
varieties; that neither the yellow- nor the black-skinned races have
this appendage except in a rudimentary degree, and in circumstances
which suggest contamination more or less direct with the white men
of the north-western quadrant of the Old World. Only the fact that
the Australians are hairier in face and person even than the whites
saves us from the temptation to adopt into anthropology the popular
superstition that the long beard is correlated with the superior brain.
But for Herodotus and the Greek world, beards on men were the rule, and
beardlessness an abnormality to be explained.
Now from Homeric times, and before, the Nearer East had been startled
by the raids of a warrior people governed and defended by beardless
creatures of wondrous horsemanship and archery, their bows in
particular such as no mere man could use; inspired, moreover, with a
fury like the fury of a woman, against everything that showed a beard.
Beyond the Caucasus they ate their prisoners; in Tauris they killed
all men, at the bidding of beardless leaders;[98] one band of them
penetrated into free Scythia, and were actually taken for women; among
their Sarmatian descendants men and women hunted and fought side by
side. But they were not confined to the trans-Euxine grassland. In Asia
Minor, when King Priam was a lad, they had occupied the plateau, and
were resisting the Thraco-Phrygian invasion. Further to the South-East,
another body of them had harried all Assyria in the seventh century,
and at Askalon their beardless descendants survived. τοῖσι τούτων
αἰεὶ ἐκγόνοισι ἐνέσκηψε ὁ θεὸς vήλεαν vοῦσον. The same defect was
observable in one element in the male population of Scythia in the
fifth century.[99] Here we detect three stages of discovery. First,
the beardless people are assumed to be women. Next it is discovered,
both in Scythia and in Palestine, that though beardless (and indeed
otherwise hairless) they are really men. Thirdly, the collateral
discovery that _some_ mounted archers were actually women, as in
Sarmatia, is held to reaffirm the legends of Amazons; in spite of
the fact that their Sarmatian descendants were known to belong to a
bisexual society, and talked a dialect of Scythian. Thus Herodotus
and his predecessors were put, after all, on a wrong track, in their
inquiry why some Scythians are beardless, and some are not. The test
case is at Askalon; where the Scythians who remained were admittedly
beardless; and the guess was loosely accepted, that all the bearded
ones had escaped the curse and gone away. The outstanding fact is the
presence of similar ἀνδρόγυνοι in Scythia itself; and at this point,
candid as ever, Herodotus throws the outstanding fact into his reader’s
lap, and passes on to other things.
At this point we turn to Hippocrates. Here we are at once in the full
current of Ionic rationalism. The theological explanation of the
phenomena is rejected at the outset. ‘For my own part, I think these
ailments are from God, and all the other ailments too; and no one of
them more divine than another, or more human either, but all alike from
God. Each of such things has a process of growth, and nothing comes
into being without a process of growth.’[100]
The ground thus cleared, Hippocrates notes four points. In the first
place beardlessness, and its reputed concomitants, were limited to
Scythians of wealth, which he explains to be synonymous with hereditary
rank; or at least were most common among these. Hippocrates, it is
true, puts this down to their equestrian habit, not to a difference
of race. Yet it is clear, from Herodotus’ account, that the Scythian
aristocracy were the result of a quite recent irruption of a purely
nomad people from beyond the Tanais, which had displaced, though not
wholly, the former population of Scythia. Secondly, he observes that
the Scythians in general differ wholly in physique from the rest of the
peoples of Europe; but he does not on that ground raise the question of
an immigrant origin. The reason for this omission, however, is clear
from his third point, that the abnormality in question is such as might
be predicted from a consideration of the climate and mode of life of
any human inhabitants of Scythia. After this, his fourth point brings
him right up to the brink of discovery, though it is not pressed to its
logical conclusion by further research; for he is clear both that the
beardlessness could exist without further disabilities, and also that,
in addition to climate and customs conducive to this bodily habit, the
Scythians were naturally inclined to be beardless. But the first of
these facts he ascribes, not without professional excuse, to successful
preventive treatment; and the latter was clearly regarded by him as
the incipient effect of climate and the like upon persons who were
congenitally normal. It is curious, meanwhile, that he does not make
use of the crucial instance of the beardless Scythians at Askalon, to
test his conclusion that beardlessness and the like are the effect
of climate; for the climate of Askalon differs from that of Scythia
in almost every important particular. It is permissible, however,
to suggest that we have here one of the numerous instances in which
important statements are recorded by Herodotus, which, whether true or
false in themselves, failed for some reason to become assimilated by
the learned world of the fourth century.
Herodotus, however, was still anything but satisfied as to the
paramount value of the physical criterion of kinship. In the majority
of cases it proved either too much or too little. A good instance is
his comparison of the Colchians with the Egyptians. Here he bases his
argument for their affinity on their common physical characters, dark
skin and woolly hair. But this proves too much: there are other peoples
with dark skin and woolly hair, who are certainly _not_ of Egyptian
origin. On the other hand it proves too little; for what he proposes
to establish here is not a general community of origin, but direct
Egyptian colonization within historic times. For this proof, he prefers
to rely on the evidence of a ceremonial custom which he regards as
typically African; for it is both Egyptian and Aethiopian; and, as it
happens to be a custom involving mutilation of the person, it belongs,
as we shall see presently, to a class of observances which were
regarded by Greek anthropology as competent to effect real changes of
physique in course of time. The merely external evidence of a common
industry, such as the linen-weaving which he adduces here, clearly
stands for Herodotus on a lower plane, along with their general
similarity of culture and language.
Clearly Herodotus was not quite satisfied as to the value of racial
types in anthropology. And there were several reasons for this. On
the one hand, the Greeks themselves held family tradition to be good
evidence of common descent; and as a matter of fact, the professional
genealogist had been beforehand with the anthropologist at nearly all
points within the Greek-speaking world. Traditions of common descent,
in fact, were too deeply fixed already in popular belief, and involved
too many practical questions, such as the rights to real property, or
to political privilege, to be treated as anything but valid evidence
of kinship. Consequently a people’s own account of their origin, or
whatever story was accepted as such, was held to be evidence of a high
order. Such price did Greek science pay for the actual solidarity of
Greek phylic institutions.
For example, the Sigynnae of the Middle Danube ‘say that they are a
colony of Medes. How they have come to be a colony of Medes, I for my
part cannot say for certain: yet anything might happen if you give it
long enough’.[101] Herodotus is prepared, that is, to allow infinite
time to accomplish an almost impossible migration, rather than give
up what he accepts as a people’s own account of their origin. But
obviously this principle of ethnography was likely to lead to great
difficulties. The Sigynnae, it is true, wore ‘Median dress’, presumably
trousers of some kind, and perhaps a shaped cap with ear-guards, no
less suitable to a Danubian than to a Median winter. But what of their
physique? In this instance Herodotus gives no details; but clearly
if conflict were to occur between the evidence for descent and for
physique--if, that is, a people claimed descent from another people of
a different physical type--it might be the difference of physique which
would stand in need of explanation.
There was another reason, besides, why traditions of common descent
should seem to deserve tender treatment, even when geographical
probability was against them. The whole Eastern Mediterranean was
still but imperfectly recovering itself after one of those periods
of prolonged and intense ethnic stress to which it is exposed by the
permeability of its northern frontier. From Thrace to Crete there
were fragmentary patches of Pelasgians; Phrygians from Macedon to
Peloponnese, far up the Adriatic, and in Western Sicily; Thracians in
Naxos and Attica; and Lydians at Askalon. The Ionian merchant, like the
Venetian of a later time, found everywhere before him the tracks of the
crusading Achaean. The Dorian Spartan in Cyprus, at Soli and Kerynia,
found Kurion already the colony of an earlier Argos; at Tarentum he
merely filled a vacant niche in an Achaean, almost a Homeric Italy. If
things like these could happen within four or five hundred years,
γένοιτο δ’ ἂν πᾶν ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῷ. Outside the Greek world it was
the same. Where Sesostris had been, the Scythian and Kimmerian had
followed, leaving their trail at Sinope and Askalon, as he in Colchis.
Nebuchadnezzar had set the Jews by the waters of Babylon. Darius was
but following the rule when he moved Paeonians to Asia Minor, and
transplanted Eretrians to Ardericca.
There was another reason also why racial type should be held liable
to easy change. The Greeks themselves, and most of their neighbours,
were mongrel peoples, for reasons which we have just seen; and there
is no doubt that climate and mode of life were actually resulting in
ruthless and rapid elimination of intrusive types, wherever these
were intolerant of Mediterranean conditions. Now in most of the
states of Ionia the blood of the citizens was mixed beyond hope of
disentanglement, even by family tradition; for family tradition, as
Professor Murray has shown us,[102] was for the most part shattered in
the migrations. Yet the external conditions were the same for all; and
men saw their blonder kinsmen and townsmen fade and cease out of the
land, without fully realizing that what needed explanation was not
their failure to survive, but their presence in those latitudes at
all. The result, for ethnology, was to encourage a belief that mankind
in itself was a pure-bred species, one and indivisible like any other
natural kind; and that the marked variations between white and black,
straight-haired and woolly-haired peoples, were exclusively the result
of climatic, if not human, selection.
Yet another consideration drove men’s thoughts inevitably in the same
connexion. One of the best inheritances of Greece from the Minoan
world was an elaborate apparatus of cultivated plants and animals: our
evidence from dogs, and olive-kernels, begins, I think, to justify this
view.[103] And in so minutely subdivided a region, special breeds of
local origin were bound to result at an early phase of industry; and
to be compared and discussed in the markets and on the quays. Every
one knew, in fact, that domesticated animals and plants, under human
direction, were tolerant of almost infinite and very rapid alteration:
and Man himself is the most highly domesticated of all. It is no wonder
then that in the fourth century Socrates is represented as arguing
habitually as if Man were a domesticated animal, whose breed could be
improved at will, and in any direction, physical or psychological. For
even psychological breeding had long been reduced to an art, both with
horses and with dogs.
Demonstrable migrations of men, therefore, and demonstrable mutations
both of men and of animals, offered evidence of a kind which it was
difficult to overlook, that natural characters were variable, and
also that acquired ones could become hereditary. It was, in fact, not
because the Greeks knew so little, but because on certain crucial
points they already knew so much, that they formed the views they did
as to the instability of human varieties. How far these views were
pressed to their conclusions will be seen best, I think, from a glance
at the teaching of Hippocrates, which we may safely take to be near the
highwater-mark of fifth-century thought on immediately pre-Socratic
lines.
A good example of the doctrine of Hippocrates is contained in his
anthropology of the Phasis valley, a region which falls sufficiently
within the same limits as the Colchis of Herodotus to be worth
comparing with his description of the Colchians. Indeed there is some
reason to believe that, for reasons both of geographical theory and of
popular ideas of utility, this corner of Hither Asia was attracting
a good deal of learned attention from the physicists of Greece. This
is what Hippocrates[104] has to say about the Phasis and its people.
‘That country is marshy and warm and well watered and thickly clothed
with vegetation, and there is heavy and violent rainfall there at all
seasons, and the habitat of its men is in the marshes, and their houses
are of wood and rushes ingeniously erected in the water, and they do
but little walking to and from town and market, but they sail to and
fro in dug-out canoes. For there are numerous artificial canals. The
waters they drink are warm and stagnant and putrefied by the sun, and
replenished by the rains. The Phasis itself too is the most stagnant
of all rivers, and of the gentlest current. And the fruits which grow
there are all unwholesome, for they are effeminated [he is thinking
of the abundance of fleshy pulpy fruit, like the stone fruits--plums,
apricots, and nectarines--which were characteristic of this region in
antiquity] and flabby by reason of the abundance of water. And that is
why they do not ripen fully. And much mist envelops the country as a
result of the water. For just these reasons the Phasians have their
bodily forms different from those of all other men. For in stature they
are tall, in breadth they are excessively broad, and no joint or vein
is to be seen upon them. Their complexion is yellow as if they had
the jaundice. Their voice is the deepest of all men’s, because their
atmosphere is not clear but foggy and moist. And for bodily exertion
they are naturally somewhat disinclined.’
Here we see an unqualified doctrine of the plasticity of human nature,
physical and mental, under the influence of climate and geographical
environment, such as his description of the Scythians has led us to
suspect already. An adjacent passage adds the further theoretical
point, that even acquired variations of wholly artificial character
may become hereditary in time. The case is that of the Macrocephali,
whose haunts unfortunately are not specified.[105] ‘In the beginning
it was their custom which was chiefly responsible for the length of
their head, but now, their mode of growth too reinforces their custom.
For they regard as best bred those who have the longest head.’ Then
he describes how the heads are remodelled in infancy by massage and
bandaging; and proceeds: ‘At the beginning the practice itself had the
result that their mode of growth was of this kind. But as time went on,
it came to be inbred so that their law was no longer compulsory:’ ἐν
φύσει ἐγένετο, ὤστε τὸν νόμον μηκέτι ἀναγκάζειν. He then explains that
just as baldness and grey eyes and physical deformities are hereditary
(for he makes no distinction between natural and acquired varieties),
‘now similarly they do not grow at all as they did before: for the
practice has no longer any force, through the people’s own neglect of
it.’
The bearing of this passage, and the doctrine which it expounds, on
Herodotus’ account of the Colchi, will be obvious at once. Clearly, if
the proportions of the head can be affected by artificial pressure,
reinforced by social selection of the most successfully deformed--that
is to say, of the individuals with the softest skulls; and if, as
Hippocrates clearly thought, the colour of the eyes, and presence or
absence of hair, were characters of the same order of transmissibility;
and if, further, as in the case of the Phasians, skin-colour and bodily
proportions resulted from climate and occupation; then clearly it
mattered comparatively little to Herodotus whether the Colchians were
woolly-haired or not. Woolly hair, like baldness, could be inherited
indeed; but it could also be superinduced, like macrocephaly, by
assiduous curling, or, as every barber knows, by the subtler influence
of atmospheric moisture. It is consequently not only because, as
suggested above, there were other woolly-haired people, besides the
Egyptians and Colchians who were in question, that Herodotus has
recourse to other evidence than that of physique to prove their
identity: it is because, for fifth-century anthropology, the evidence
of physique itself did not justify conclusions of appreciably higher
validity than those which resulted from the comparison of industries or
customs.
It will be seen from all this that in questions relating to the
evolution of Man, Herodotus exhibits--and shares with the whole thought
of his time--precisely the opposite weakness to that of the pioneers
of modern anthropology. His mistakes arise, not because he is unable
to allow time enough for evolutionary changes, but because he tries to
crowd too great an amplitude of change into the liberal allowance of
time which he is prepared to grant. Ten thousand years, or even twenty
thousand, would be a short allowance, in modern geology, for even so
active a river as the Nile to fill up the whole Red Sea; but it is more
than double the whole length allotted to ‘geological time’ within the
memory of men still living.
It will also be clear how deep was the impression created on the Greek
mind by the minor changes of the seasons and of history. The formula of
Heracleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει, had indeed its application to
metaphysic; but its origin was in physical science, as a generalization
from experience. It had its negative interest as an implement of
sceptical destruction. But it had also a high positive value, for it
formulated the present as transitional from the past to the future;
it emphasized the kinetic and physiological aspect of nature and of
science, which has ever been of so far higher value, in research, as in
life, than the static and morphological; it substituted an analysis of
processes for classification of the qualities of things.
Now it is to this phase of scientific theory that we must assign the
first intrusion into scientific terminology of the twin words φύσις and
νόμος; in their primitive sense they denote nothing else than precisely
such natural processes in themselves, on the one hand, and man’s
formulation of such processes, on the other.
It is the more important to keep in mind this fundamental conception
of Greek physical anthropology when we go on to consider either the
treatment of the evidence of language and culture, which we find in
Herodotus, or the applications of physical classification to the
purposes of logic and metaphysic. To take the latter first: a doctrine
of the real existence of natural kinds, corresponding each, as
Hippocrates would put it, to a process of growth peculiar to itself,
was clearly easier to understand, if not to discover and formulate,
when the men who were to discuss it were already brought up to regard
the animal world, for example, as consisting of a comparatively small
number of fundamental types, and the infinite variety of individual
and regional forms as the effect of external forces upon them. Each
actual example of horse or dog, for example, was to be regarded on the
one hand as the embodiment of a true equine or canine nature, which
reason might hope to detect and isolate; but on the other, it lay like
the god Glaucus, encrusted with accidental qualities, the effects of
its exposure to a particular environment. Seen in the light of their
pre-Socratic history, as elements in the terminology of a great school
of naturalists, the catch-words φύσις, γένος, εἶδος, and συμβεβηκὸς
gain something, I think, in significance. In particular, it becomes
clearer why the word εἶδος, which continued to be used among the
naturalists for the specific outcome of συμβεβηκότα upon a member or
members of a γένος, came among the philosophers to supersede the word
γἑνος in proportion as the centre of reflective interest shifted from
the objective exponent of a φύσις to the subjective standpoint of the
philosophic observer.
For Herodotus, meanwhile, language and culture can change under stress
of circumstances in just the same way as physique; and therefrom
follows the possibility of the transmission of culture. Whether any
particular custom was to be regarded as innate in the φύσις of those
who practised it, or as their response to the stresses of their
present environment, or as the result, whether conformable to the
environment or not, of intercourse with another variety of Man, was a
question to be settled on the merits of each case. It was, in fact,
partly the laxness of interest in such matters which resulted from the
prevalent theory, and only partly the admitted incompleteness of the
observations, that kept ethnographical speculation in so backward a
state as we find it in Herodotus’ time. Until the belief in stronger
specific characters could be supplemented by some doctrine of cultural
momentum, the conception of progress in civilization was hardly
attainable at all. This is where the treatment of Hellenic civilization
by Herodotus stands in so marked a contrast with his treatment of the
civilizations of Egypt and Outland. Egyptian civilization, like Egypt
itself, is the gift of the Nile; the φύσις of an Indian attains its
τέλος when he has ridden his camels and rescued his gold; the men
are black, or tall, or longlived as the effect of natural causes;
and as long as these causes persist, so long will there be Indians
or Aethiopians with those qualities. Only in Greece is there mastery
of man over nature, and that not because nature is less strong, but
because Greek man is strong enough to dominate it.
This is how it comes about that barriers of language and of culture, no
less than barriers of descent, are powerless in face of a well-defined
γένος with a potent φύσις of its own. Such a γἑνος can add to the
number of individuals which compose it. Pelasgians and Lelegians can
_become_ Hellenes. For Herodotus, as I have explained more in detail
elsewhere, the process of conversion of barbarians to the Hellenic
φύσις is not clear: the verbs which he employs, μετέβαλον, μετέμαθον,
are intransitive; the general impression which is conveyed is of a
kind of spontaneous generation: and the same language is used when τὸ
Ἐλληνικόν is described as ἀποσχισθὲν ἀπὸ τοῦ βαρβἀρου, in the earliest
phase of all. For Thucydides, on the other hand--as was natural to
an Athenian who had seen Atticism triumphant in Hellas--Hellenism is
acquired by contact with, and imitation of, the φύσις of a genuine
Hellene. Of course this explanation of Pelasgian conversion only pushes
the problem itself one stage further back; but it marks a distinct
advance in analysis beyond the point reached by Herodotus; and it
is an advance in precisely the opposite direction to that in which
naturalists like Hippocrates were being led through their greater
insistence on the external factors, which were the main subject of
their study. Thucydides in fact stands already on the Socratic side of
the line. The explanation of the transmissibility of culture is to be
sought for him not in physiology, but in psychology--not in spontaneous
or coercive adjustment to inexorable nature, but in intercourse with
enlightened minds.
Among the many different classes of information which Herodotus
inclines to give about foreign peoples, two kinds of data are more
insistently recorded than the others. There are the marriage customs,
and the principal source of food. These will be admitted to be obvious
points to note; but there was a special motive in the fifth century
for collecting each of them; and the history of thought in the century
which followed allows us to trace this motive forward into a maturer
context.
The problem of the status of the sexes in society was not a new one
in fourth-century Greece. As far back, indeed, as we can trace social
institutions directly at all, society in Greece had been constituted on
patriarchal lines. But patriarchal institutions had far less undisputed
acceptance in the Greek world than they had for example in Italy.
It was not merely that Attic rules of inheritance gave a definite,
though at all times secondary, status to the mother’s kindred; or
that in Sparta, Thebes, and some other states, the women enjoyed in
many respects a social equality with the men which has been explained
in more ways than one. An Ionian Greek had only to travel down his
own coast as far as Lycia to find men reckoning descent through the
mother, or to travel back in imagination to the legendary origins of
his own people, to find that their pedigrees went often up, not to a
god, but to a woman. Olympian society was the same. The consort of Zeus
held a very different position from that of the wife in a patriarchal
household; and on the Asiatic shore, at least, the gods themselves were
traced back to a Mother, not to a Father, of them all.
Hints, too, were not wanting as to the recent arrival, and un-Aegean
origin, of the patriarchal system, which had now prevailed, with its
proprietary view of women; and, no less, of the loose hold which this
set of customs had upon the popular belief and opinion. In the
opening chapters of his history, Herodotus states, and allows his
Περσέων λὁγιοι to criticize freely, what might be summarized as a
_cherchez-la-femme_ theory of the Eastern Question: and the criticism
which he records amounts essentially to the question, ‘Does the
position of women in society, as we know it, justify the attempts which
have been made to explain the great quarrel by incidents such as those
of Io, Medea, and Helen?’ Now this criticism is not merely Persian,
nor even Herodotean; the problem whether the Trojan War was really
fought about Helen was at least as old as Stesichorus. No sooner did
the wakening mind of Hellas cease merely to believe Homer, and begin to
think about him, than it struck at once upon this very paradox:--‘Homer
says, and insists throughout, that all the war was wrought for Helen’s
sake; but do we Greeks ever dream of doing anything of the kind? are
our women the least worth fighting about? If they run away with a
foreigner, do we not, as a matter of fact, say “good riddance”, and go
about our business?’ How this paradox presented itself to Stesichorus
and to other literary thinkers of early Greece, and how Herodotus has
chosen to handle their solution of it, is a thrice-told tale. All that
I am concerned to suggest, at present, is that, at every point where we
can test it, opinion in Greece was in flux as to the rightful position
of woman in civilized society.
The rapid extension of the field of Greek knowledge of other peoples’
customs, which resulted from the voyages and settlements of the seventh
century, no less than the severe strain which the economic evolution in
that century and the next put upon the very framework of society in
Greek states, led inevitably, as we know, to very reasonable scepticism
as to the naturalness of patriarchal institutions in themselves: and
this not only among the Physicists. We have hints of it in the Lyric,
and explicit discussion in the Drama. ‘Is a man nearer akin to his
father or to his mother?’ that is the point on which for Aeschylus the
fate of Orestes turns in the last resort. The Apollo of Aeschylus,
Λητοίδης though he be, is on the side of the angels, but his proof
belongs to a phase of observation which, while it conforms precisely to
the patriarchal jurisprudence, was obsolete already for Hippocrates.
The _Andromache_ and the _Medea_ of Euripides mark in due course the
turn of the tide, even in Drama; and, with the feminist plays of
Aristophanes, we are in full course for the _Republic_ of Plato, the
fine flower, on this side of the subject, of the conviction (which is
really pre-Socratic) that social organization, like any other, is at
bottom a matter of the adaptation of natural means to ends.
Of this controversy Herodotus is no mere spectator. It can hardly be a
chance that every one of the strange marriage customs which he mentions
happens to be typical of a widespread type of observance; and that the
series of them taken together forms an analysis of such types which
is almost complete between the extremes of promiscuous union with
classificatory relationship on the one hand, and normal patriarchal
monogamy on the other.
Herodotus is of course not writing a history of Human Marriage, or of
Woman’s Rights; it is only as a current topic of controversy that such
matters come into his story at all; but, when they do, I think we can
see that his contribution to them is not quite a casual one; that he
is not simply emptying an ill-filled notebook on to the margins of
his history; but that where he digresses he does so to fill a gap in
current knowledge, with materials which, if not new, are at all events
well authenticated; and that these materials have partly been elicited
by his own interest in specific problems which were burning questions
at the moment.
The question of social organization, and provision for orderly descent,
was for Herodotus a matter of pure science. But for some of his
contemporaries it was different. Archelaus, in particular, the last,
and in some respects the most advanced, of the Physicists, has the
reputation of having applied physicist methods to politics and morals:
καὶ γὰρ περὶ νόμων πεφιλοσόφηκε καὶ καλῶν καὶ δικαίων.[106] Two points
in the account given of him by Diogenes have usually been put on one
side; that he came from Miletus and had sat at the feet of Anaxagoras,
beyond whose physics, however, he failed to advance appreciably;[107]
and that Socrates had borrowed from him much of what commonly passed
as Socratic. But the two statements go together. An Ionian Physicist,
who had passed on to ‘philosophize about customs, their goodness and
justice’, was certainly a pendent portrait to that of the Socrates of
the _Clouds_ and of the _Memorabilia_, with his earlier interest (which
his enemies never forgot) in τὰ μετέωρα, and his invincible habit of
treating Man as an animal species about which it was permissible to
argue by the analogy of other ‘rational animals’ like horses and dogs.
Indeed the predominant interest which the next generation took in the
later phases of Socrates the Moralist, have obscured, perhaps unduly,
the significance of these glimpses of his immaturer thought.
The same Archelaus is credited--or discredited--with another saying,
characteristic of the Milesian way of looking at Mankind:--‘Justice
and injustice,’ he said, ‘exist not in nature but in custom.’ Here
again, the practice of Herodotus is instructive. Repeatedly he notes of
distant peoples either that they are the ‘justest of Mankind’, or that
they have this or that ‘custom’ which is praiseworthy or the reverse;
and, even among the highest of civilized beings, ‘Custom is King.’
This is not perhaps the place to enter at length on a discussion of the
Herodotean usage of νόμος, or its relation with its correlative φύσις.
But it can hardly be passed by without the remark that the varying
use of the word in Herodotus--and his uses do vary in detail--are all
included in that earlier, and characteristically Ionian sense, in which
the word is used to denote the formal expression of _what actually
happens_, among the people, and in the circumstances, which are in
question. This is of course a quite immediate, and very early sense of
the word; it connects itself directly with the primary signification
of a _pasture_ within which a flock may roam unchecked and unharmed,
but beyond which it strays at its peril or not at all. Νόμος has thus
exactly the force of the Roman conception of a _provincia_, except
that where provincia _prescribed_ the limits and the character of
appropriate acts, νόμος merely _described_ them. In so far then as νὁμος
answered originally to our word _law_, it answered exclusively to that
sense of it in which we speak of a _law of nature_, meaning thereby our
more or less accurate formulation, in a descriptive way, of the actual
course of events of the given type.
In this sense obviously there is no contrast or antagonism conceivable
between νόμος and φύσις. Let the φύσις of an oak, for example--the
growth-process of that kind of tree--be to put forth branches, leaves,
and fruit of a specific sort: this is no less the νόμος of that oak;
the way it normally behaves. So, too, with Man. The normal, natural
behaviour of the Egyptian is to teach his son a trade, this is one of
his νόμοι, as seen and described by an observer from outside; but this
is also what he and his ancestors have done φύσει for generations, till
an Egyptian who does otherwise is hardly conceivable. We have already
seen in the case of Hippocrates the mode of procedure whereby what
began as a νόμος was conceived as modifying the φύσις by incorporation
in it.
What was the outcome of these observations on the family structure
of savages, and of the speculations as to their ‘naturalness’ or the
reverse? The answer is given, I think, when we look into the fourth
century, and find Socrates, the last of the pre-Socratics, propounding
in the _Republic_, and justifying by chapter and verse in the _Laws_,
the unnaturalness, because the uselessness or inexpediency, of
patriarchal society as the Greeks knew it. From Athenian politics
patriarchal considerations had been eliminated in theory a century
before, by that amazing revolutionary, Cleisthenes; but socially the
father still owned and ruled his children; and children paid
divided allegiance to their father and to the state. As presented
in the _Republic_ the Socratic argument has little about it that
is anthropological; the appeal is to horses and dogs, not to
Sarmatians; but the actual institutions of the Ideal State, the annual
mating-festivals, the κομψοὶ κλῆροι by which status is allotted to each
infant after inspection by the governors, the whole classificatory
system of relationship, are one and all to be found among the curious
νόμοι which we know to have been recorded by the anthropologists of
the century before; and recorded, too, with the definite intention of
discovering what their causes were, and what were the reasons assigned
for those customs by the people who practised and understood them.
It is against such speculations as these, of course, and in particular
against the Socratic attempt to make Amazons and Nasamonians rise up
in judgement against this generation, that Aristotle was moved to
restate in the first section of the _Politics_ the orthodox sociology
of patriarchal Greece. That in the middle of the fourth it should
have been possible for a serious person to maintain the paradox
φύσει ἀρχικὸς πατὴρ υἱῶν without instant refutation by the members
of his classroom, is a measure of the extent to which the followers
of Socrates (though, as we have seen, not Socrates himself) had
broken with the fifth-century naturalists, and perhaps even ceased to
read them. But it is a measure also of the extent to which an able
dialectician could make play with words like φύσις and νόμος, till it
almost appeared as if any one who had any νόμοι to speak of represented
a παρέκβασις from the φύσει ἄνθρωπος. No amount of _a priori_ argument
as to the superior strength, or intelligence, or sheer ‘superiority’ of
the human male, could obliterate the fact that here women ruled, there
they fought, elsewhere they did the work instead of the man, or, bar
the reflection, that it was the business of an editor of συνηγμέναι
πολιτεῖαι to collect these human institutions too, before generalizing;
and, in general, to distinguish τὸ παρὰ φύσιν from τὸ παράδοξον.
Alongside of the problem of family organization, lay the other problem
of the means of subsistence. Some men live wholly on the fruit of a
tree; others eat corn, or milk, or monkeys, or their elderly relatives.
And here again the evidence falls into two classes. There are customs
in which the eating appears to us as a ritual act designed by those
who observed or initiated it to secure some ultimately useful end:
they frequently belong to the kind of acts which we class together
as Sympathetic Magic. There are also customs in respect of food,
which to us appear to have only an economic interest; or if they have
wider interest at all, acquire it from another consideration. Current
anthropology--French anthropology in particular--and our own economic
surroundings combine to bring home to us keenly the thought that the
way in which a people gets its daily bread, not to mention the previous
question how it is to get anything to eat at all (except, perhaps, its
own unemployables), has a direct and profound influence on its social
structure. A late stage of Greek thought on this subject is represented
by the section in the first book of the _Politics_ which classifies the
principal βίοι which are open to mankind, and hints (though the subject
is not pursued) that the Good Life will be pursued with a very different
equipment of customs and institutions according as it is pursued by
the pastoral nomad ‘farming his migratory field’, or by the miner,
or by the merchant seaman. A little earlier in thought as well as in
time comes the sketch in the _Republic_, a glimpse of the earlier
Socrates who had dabbled in geography and improved the ‘inventions’
of Archelaus. The later Socrates, wise in his own failures, takes his
pupils hurriedly past this avenue of inquiry into the structure of
society; the disciples, for the credit of the Master’s originality,
omit all allusion to Archelaus and his work. But the Milesian who
began with Physics, and went on to show what nowadays we should call
‘the applicability of biological laws to Man’, cannot have been
without weight in the political thought of his time; and it is again
to Herodotus that we must turn for indications of the extent to which
this inquiry was already being followed in Greece in the generation of
Archelaus, and before it.
Already in Homer imagination had been caught by the total distinctness
of the mode of life which was followed by the nomads of the North; and
a vague connexion had been felt between the purely pastoral existence
and a peculiarly orderly habit of life and behaviour. A fragment of
Choerilus, whom those who had access to his work felt to stand in some
peculiarly close relation to Herodotus, connects these two qualities
explicitly;[108] and the same thought recurs twice over in that
storehouse of anthropological learning, the _Prometheus Solutus_ of
Aeschylus.[109] In the latter passage it would be forcing the literal
sense of the words unduly, to insist that the Gabii are to be pictured
as living on wild corn, especially as Greek theory was at all other
points unanimous that corn, like the olive and the vine, came to man by
special providence as something ἡμερον φύσει. The Aeschylean picture
clearly is that of the virgin soil of the trans-Euxine grassland,
where the spring vegetation will endure comparison with any merely
Aegean cornland.
There is enough in this single example to show that the men of the
early fifth century were already aware of the inter-dependence of
environment, economy, and institutions. For the generation of Socrates,
we have the treatise of Hippocrates already mentioned, ‘On Air, Water,
and Places’; of which the whole burden is, as we have seen, that not
only men’s social organization, but their very physique, is the result
of ‘acquired variations’ initiated by the climate and economic régime.
I hinted, a little earlier, that there is another reason why Herodotus
should pay close attention to the peculiar food of strange peoples.
That different kinds of food-quest should lead to different manners
and institutions was probably, even in the fifth century, a less
familiar conception than that the personal qualities of the individual
depended directly on the food which he ate. This is of course a matter
of elementary knowledge to most savages; it is an explicit principle
of the medical doctrine of Hippocrates; it has had the profoundest
influence on the vocabulary and ritual of great religions, and it
has by no means disappeared from the current thought of mankind; it
is still believed, by otherwise intelligent people, that the morals
of nations may be mended, by defining the quality of their food and
the quantity of their drink. With this conception in mind, we shall
cease to be surprised that Herodotus devotes so much time and care to
describe the preparation of plum-cake, or kirschwasser, or beer. Man
might not live by bread alone; but if you once were certain that a man
did live on bread, and not on monkeys, or on lice, you knew already a
good deal about the habits and the value of that man.
It was probably the circumstance that this magical interpretation was
so commonly attached to food-supply that prevented Greek observers,
such as Herodotus and Hippocrates, from pressing home their analysis
of the food-quest as an index of the general economic régime. And the
same ambiguity envelops also, unfortunately, the next recorded attempt
at such analysis. It can hardly be accident that, in the sketch of the
ἀναγκαιοτάτη πόλις in the _Republic_,[110] the diet of the citizens is
wholly vegetarian, and almost wholly cereal. And when Glaucon
interrupts, and asks what has happened to the meat, Socrates wilfully
misunderstands his question, and prescribes once more only salt,
cheese, and _vegetable_ relishes--olives, and bulbous roots, and wild
herbs, with figs, lentils, and beans, myrtle-berries and forest nuts to
follow. Glaucon’s comment on this is precise and contemptuous: ‘If you
had been planning a city of pigs, Socrates, what other fodder than this
would you have given them?’ And on being pressed for an alternative, he
stipulates expressly for the _customary_ food of civilized men, ‘and
meat dishes such as people have nowadays.’ It is entirely in keeping
with all this,[111] that ὄψα recur further on, along with tables,
chairs, and unguents, as signs of a corrupted state; that hunters and
cooks appear among the ministers of luxury; and swineherds last of all,
for the pig alone among cattle gives neither milk or cheese, but is
useful only for meat diet.
Here three distinct lines of argument are inextricably confused. In the
first place, we have seen already that it was the regular Greek belief
that man began existence as a forest animal, living on the hazel-nuts
and acorns characteristic of the Balkan and Anatolian regions; and only
acquired the knowledge of corn, wine, and oil by special providence,
and at a later time: in this sense, therefore, Socrates is proposing
a return to primitive diet. In the second place, the diet which he
suggests is the only one possible for people who should try to live a
life independent and at the same time inoffensive. But, thirdly, this
diet is precisely that which a fourth-century doctor would have been
expected to prescribe for a patient τρυφῶντὶ καὶ φλεγμαίνοντι. But
there is enough of common motive in all three considerations, to make
it clear that even one of the least anthropological among his pupils
could represent Socrates as starting from a conception of man and
his place in the world which is precisely that of a fifth-century
physicist.[112]
I conclude with a well-known Herodotean episode, in which much true
history has been remodelled clearly in the light of a definite
classification of βίοι, and a definite theory of their relative values
and economic interactions. In the story of the rise of Peisistratus, as
told by Herodotus,[113] the _motif_ of the action throughout the first
phase of his career is that of three contrasted βίοι: the life of the
shore, of the sea, and of the men from over the hills. In form the
division is geographical, but the phrase which is used, τῷ λόγῳ τῶν
ὑπερακρίων προστάς, suggests that it is not a district but a region
which is in question; and that what differentiated this region from
the others was this, that it lay above corn level. Any one who will
go in spring-time and look round from the Acropolis upon Attica, will
recognize that abrupt change from the emerald green to the purple and
brown, which tells where πεδίον and cornland end, and the goats of the
ὑπεράκρια begin. And I have seen along the base of Taygetus, along the
same economic frontier, where a track like a coastguard’s path has been
worn by the police patrols, in their attempt, not always successful, to
prevent στάσις from bursting into πόλεμος. We should note in passing
that the question whether the pastoral highlanders of Attica exhausted
the whole content of the λόγος τῶν ὐπερακρίων--whether, that is, the
party of Peisistratus included the mining interests of the district
of Laureion, as suggested by Mr. Ure,[114] is totally distinct from
the question now before us, which is simply what the word conveyed
to the mind of Herodotus the Halicarnassian. And if this distinction
be granted, the suggestion, which is after all the conventional one,
that the ground of division between the Attic factions was regarded by
Herodotus as an economic one, receives much support from the perennial
state of Balkan lands, with their oases of corn-growers amid a highland
wilderness of Vlachs.
In these circumstances, the fact that Peisistratus, whatever his
real character may have been, is described as the leader of the most
_backward_ section of the population, is entirely in agreement with the
rest of the picture. For throughout, in Herodotus’ presentation of him,
Peisistratus is the man of paradoxes. His father, before his birth, had
accepted the omen of the cauldron spontaneously boiling; the son was to
kindle a great fire where there was no light--but only plenty of fuel.
So again, Peisistratus, unlike the Sibyl, at each rejection offers
Athens more. The rejected party-leader becomes Athena’s man, the man of
an united Attica; and Athena’s man, whom Athena’s people expelled,
rests not till he can offer, of his own, every corner stone of an
Athenian Empire in its greatest days. And so here, again, there is
_stasis_ between rich and poor, between primitive and advanced, between
sedentary and nomad--so far as nomadism was practicable in Attica; and
it is the λεπτὰ τῶν προβάτων, as with Perdiccas and with David, which
produce, in due time, the great man. It is a miniature, of course,
this sketch of the sixth-century Attica, as befits its modest part in
the scheme of the Herodotean drama; but the handling of it is none the
less significant, on that account, of the way in which the idea of
conflicting νὁμοι is allowed to model and interpret the materials.
I have tried, in brief space, to indicate some ways in which our
knowledge of the Greek world, fragmentary as it is, enables us to
recover some at least of the broad lines of method by which the early
history of Man, and the causes of his variations and of his social
states, were being investigated in the fifth century and before: and
to interpret some of the results which were reached, in the light of
the reasoning which led to them, and the principles by which they
were interpreted in antiquity. We have seen that in some points Greek
anthropology had gone surprisingly far, in speculation, and in acute
observation too; and we have seen it baffled, in other directions, by
puzzles and mistakes which seem trivial to us. And we have seen, in the
particular instance of one who was at the same time a great historian
and an alert observer of anthropological fact, something of the way in
which pre-Socratic stages of theory worked out when they were applied
to research in the hands of an ordinary man. Above all, I have ventured
to suggest--what I hope it may be for others to carry forward--an
inquiry into the anthropological basis of the political doctrine of
Socrates; and so to link him, on this side of his thought, with that
great body of naturalist work, which I would gladly believe that he
came not to destroy but to fulfil.