Part 11

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[64] The Muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne: but who was their Father?

[65] Schol. _Od._ xix. 163.

[66] _Fr._ 64 (Didot).

[67] _Fr._ 25 (Didot).

[68] Plut. _De Plac. Phil._ v. 19 (Ritter and Preller, 7th ed., 16).

[69] Euseb. _Praep. Ev._ i. 8 (R. P. 16).

[70] Plut. _Symp. Quaest._ viii. 8. 4 (R. P. 16).

[71] Hippocrates, περἱ φύσιος παιδίου (ed. Kuhn, Leipzig, 1825, p. 391).

[72] Hippolytus, _Ref. Haer._ i. 9 (R. P. 171).

[73] Herodotus ii. 143.

[74] Herodotus ii. 10-11.

[75] Herodotus ii. 12.

[76] Herodotus v. 9.

[77] Aeschylus, _Fr._ 177.

[78] _Fr._ 183.

[79] _Suppl._ 286.

[80] _Fr._ 303.

[81] _Fr._ 290.

[82] _P. V._ 808.

[83] _Fr._ 178.

[84] _Suppl._ 287.

[85] _P. V._ 723.

[86] Compare μύρμηκες in _P. V._ 453 with Hes. _Fr._ 64, about the aborigines of Aegina, and with Lucretius v. 790 ff.

[87] _Persae_, 181 ff.

[88] _Suppl._ 234 ff.

[89] _Suppl._ 287-8.

[90] _Suppl._ 241-3.