Part 9

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]