Chapter IV: Part 4

Perhaps I should remark in passing that other things besides a person’s name or image may be ‘nailed’ or ‘defixed’. His footprints may be, and are, thus treated both by savages and by European peasants. In the same way, we learn from Pliny (_Nat. Hist._ xxviii. 63), the epilepsy which had attacked a man might be ‘nailed down’ and the patient cured by driving an iron nail into the spot touched by the head of the patient when he fell (‘clavum ferreum defigere in quo locum primum caput fixerit corruens morbo comitiali absolutorium eius mali dicitur’). And there can be little doubt that this kind of ‘defixion’ goes back to very early Italian times, for, from of old when a pestilence raged, a consul might drive a nail into the wall of the Celia Iovis, and so the pestilence was stayed. Perhaps the _clavus trabalis_ which was an attribute of _dira Necessitas_ (Horace, _Odes_ i. 35. 17, iii. 24. 5) belongs to the same range of ideas (cf. Kuhnert’s article on _Defixio_ in Pauly’s _Real-Encyclopädie_).

Here too I should perhaps say that, as the _defixionum tabellae_ have nails driven through them, there can be little doubt that the verb καταδέω and the substantives κατάδεσις and κατάδεσμος must be used in the sense of hammering a nail in, or fastening with a nail (as Pindar uses the simple verb δέω, in δῆησεν ἄλοις, _Pyth._ iv. 71), and are not used in this connexion to mean simply ‘tying up’. So too in _D. T. A._, 96, 97 ἓδησα τὴν γλῶτταν is shown by the convertible expression κέντησον αὐτοῦ τὴν γλῶτταν to mean ‘pierce’ or ‘nail’, and not ‘tie up’.

As then the Ojibway Indian, or the Australian black fellow, or the native of the Torres Straits, does his magic without calling in any god to his assistance, so too the Greek could ‘nail’ his man without applying to the gods; and we have ample inscriptional evidence that he did so. Nearly one-third of the Attic tablets contain merely proper names with a nail driven into them; and about one-third more contain the statement καταδῶ or καταδίδημι, without any reference to gods of any sort or kind. The Latin tablets of the same kind, which like the Attic tablets are of lead and have nails driven through them, also frequently contain merely proper names and nothing more. Of this kind evidently were those mentioned by Tacitus (_Ann._ ii. 69), ‘carmina et devotiones et nomen Germanici plumbeis tabulis insculptum.’ It is true that the tablets which have been discovered have mostly been found in tombs. But if we were to seek to found on this fact an argument that the tablets--where they mention no gods--were addressed to the dead, we should have first to show that such tablets were never deposited elsewhere than in tombs. As a matter of fact, a magical papyrus (CXXI, vs. 458) gives instructions as to where a tablet of this kind should be deposited, viz. ἢ ποταμὸν ἢ γῆν ἢ θάλασσαν ἤγουν ἢ θήκην ἢ εἰς φρέαρ. We see therefore a plain reason why most of the tablets that have been preserved have been found in tombs: many, possibly most, were thrown into rivers, or the sea, or disused wells (εἱς φρέαρ ἁχρημάτιστον, _Pap. Anast._ 351), as in Scotland the clay figure of your enemy is, or was, placed in a burn (_Albany Review_, iii. 17, p. 532), and therefore have not been preserved to us.

They have been rarely discovered by us, for the simple reason that the person who hid them away was particularly anxious that they should not be discovered. It was important that the person ‘defixed’ should not know by whom or in what way he had been ‘defixed’, for, if he knew, he might undo the spell and retaliate on its worker. The tablet was concealed--often enough in tombs, for graves are avoided--for the same reason that the authors of these tablets often take care not to put their own names to them, viz. in order that the spell might not be frustrated. But though we cannot attach any great importance to the fact that most of our tablets have been found in tombs, still it is true that many of the Attic tablets, and perhaps most of the Latin tablets, contain a direct and explicit appeal to the gods. Hence it is possible to maintain, and indeed it is usually maintained, as by Wuensch, in the _Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum_, that in all cases these tablets are addressed to the gods; and that, where no gods are mentioned, we must yet suppose that the gods, or some gods, were prayed to fulfil the evil wishes of the person who wrote the name of his victim and pierced it with the nail. The alternative which I venture to suggest is that originally the _defixio_ or κατάδεσμος was purely magical; that, later, an appeal to the gods was added to the original spell; and, last of all, the magical element was overpowered by the religious, or the religious by the magical. In order to decide between these two alternative explanations, what we have to do is to inquire who it is that is supposed by the writer of a tablet of this kind to nail or ‘defix’ or pierce the person who is to suffer. Is it the writer of the tablet, or is it a god? If it is the writer, the proceeding is magical in its nature; if a god, it is religious in its nature. From this point of view we may go so far as to concede that the absence of any mention of the gods on the tablet does not of itself suffice to prove that no thought of them was present in the mind of the writer of the tablet. The decisive question is, Who does the nailing or defixing? Has the writer the power to do it, or must he get a god to do it? The question is perfectly simple, and the answer is perfectly plain; in many or most of the Attic tablets it is the writer who has the power, and he exercises it. He says, τούτους ἄπαντας καταδῶ (43), τούτους ἑγὼ καταδίδημι ἄπαντας (55); and he exercises his power with no more reference to the gods, and no more thought of them, than the Australian magician when he ‘points’ his stick, or the German peasant girl when she ‘sticht um Mitternacht in eine unter Beschwörungen angezündete Kerze einige Nadeln und spricht: “ich stech das Licht, ich stech das Licht, ich stech das Herz, das ich liebe”’ (Schönwerth, _Aus der Oberpfalz: Sitten und Sagen_, i, p. 127).

On the other hand are the tablets in which the writer does not profess to ‘defix’ his adversary, and does not claim to be able to ‘defix’ him, but prays to a god to do it, and uses an imperative, κέντησον αὐτοῦ τὴν γλῶσσαν (97), ἄξον καὶ κατάδησον (xxiii).

In such tablets the _modus operandi_ is no longer magical, it is wholly religious; the power to punish lies wholly with the gods, and they are called upon to exercise it. And we are able to trace the process by which the one kind of tablet passed into the other, or by which the one kind came to supersede the other. The first step in the process is illustrated by tablets in which the writer begins by announcing in the traditional magical style, ‘I nail or bind my enemies,’ but goes on--in order to make assurance doubly sure--to add an appeal to a god or gods. Thus in 81 he says καταδέω τοὺς ἑμοὶ ἑχθροὺς πρὸς τὸν Ἐρμῆν. One of these inscriptions (87) can be dated back to the fourth century B.C. When Hermes is thus adjured he is nearly always decorated with the epithet κάτοχον, as in 87 τούτους πάντας καταδῶ πρὸς τὸν κάτοχον Ὲρμῆν. The epithet is not an idle one, as is shown by the fact that the corresponding verb, κατέχω, is used in these tablets in the imperative in the same sense as κατάδησον. Thus in 88 the prayer to Hermes runs, Ἑρμῆ κάτοχε, κάτεχε φρένας γλῶτταν τοῦ Καλλίου. Hermes, however, is not the only deity to whom the epithet is applied, and this imperative addressed. In 101 Gê is termed Γῆ κάτοχος, and in 98 the prayer is φίλη Γῆ, κάτεχε Εὑρυπτόλεμον. It so happens that in the tablets that have come down to us Hermes and Gê are the only two deities of whom the epithet κάτοχος and the verb κατέχω are used; and Boeckh was probably right in saying (_C. I. G._ 539) that the earth and Hermes were originally (and, we may add, without any reference to magic at all) called κάτοχοι, because they kept down the dead and prevented them from returning. Then, when the magical practice of nailing down or binding your living foe developed, by an easy transition of ideas the deities, whose business it had originally been to hold down the dead alone, were invoked to hold down and restrain the living also: ‘vocis vis ad καταδέσμων rationem translata videtur, ut iam κάτοχοι θεοί essent ii, qui defixos a magis homines detinerent.’ Thus Earth and Hermes were called in to reinforce the magician’s κατάδεσμος. This is indeed expressly stated on a leaden tablet discovered in Alexandria (Wuensch, p. xv): πότνια Γῆ ὁρκίζω σε κατὰ σοῦ ὁνόματος ποιῆσαι τὴν πρᾶξιν ταύτην καὶ τηρῆσαί μοι τὸν κατάδεσμον τοῦτον καὶ ποιῆσαι αὑτὸν ἑνεργῆ. That the gods are called in to give effect to a magical rite which has been performed is shown by inscriptions 96 and 97, where the tablet begins by saying that the magical rite has been performed, ἑγὼ ἕλαβον καὶ ἔδησα τὴν γλῶτταν καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν κτλ., and then goes on to pray to the god, κέντησον αὑτοῦ τὴν γλῶτταν κτλ. Here the prayer to the gods is in effect a postscript to the magical rite. So, too, in Ovid (_Fasti_ ii. 575) a ceremony of this kind, which is performed as part of the worship of the Dea Muta, ends up with the declaration that we--viz. the old woman who has performed the rite--we, ‘hostiles linguas inimicaque vinximus ora’; she has used an iron nail and driven it through the head of a _maena_. But the tendency which manifests itself in the evolution of the Attic tablets is for the postscript to grow in importance and size, until the magic dwindles and almost disappears. For instance, 98 does indeed begin by saying formally Εὑρυπτόλεμον καταδῶ, but the whole of the rest of the inscription is a genuine prayer, φίλη Γῆ κάτεχε, φίλη Γῆ βοήθει μοι. While recognizing however, that this is the tendency in the genuine Attic tablets, it is desirable to notice that in the Roman empire generally the magical element swells until it entirely drives out the religious. All kinds of deity, from religions of every sort, are indeed invoked in these later inscriptions, both Greek and Latin. But they are invoked only to receive commands from the magician and to do his will: in the Hadrumetan tablet of the third century A.D. the deity adjured is just told to go off and fetch Urbanus, ἄπελθε πρὸς τὸν Οὑρβανὸν καὶ ἅξον αὑτόν (_Wuensch_, p. xvii), and the lady who thus addresses him has the power to order him about because she knows--and bids him hearken to--an ὀνόματος ἑντείμου καὶ φοβεροῦ καὶ μεγάλοῦ. And he is to lose no time about it: the inscription ends, ἥδη ἥδη ταχὺ ταχύ.

Thus the history of these _defixionum tabellae_ shows how a ceremony, in its origin purely magical, may in the course of its evolution run out in either of two directions: it may either end in what is in effect a prayer, or it may develop into that form of magic in which the magician undertakes boldly to constrain the gods. In the earliest, and purely magical, form of ‘defixion’, the witch or wizard drives a nail or a needle through the written name of the victim, just as he would through a waxen image of the victim. From _Ovid_ (_Amores_ iii. 7. 29) we learn that the witch wrote the victim’s name on wax and then pierced it: ‘sagave poenicea defixit nomina cera.’ In the Parisian Papyrus 316 it is τὸ ὄνομα τῆς ἀγομένης which is thus treated; and in a Latin ‘defixion’ the expression is ‘neca illa nomina’ (Fahz, _de poetarum Romanorum doctrina magica_, p. 127, n. 4). Then, as the worker of magic drove nails through the head of the waxen image, and is instructed, in the Parisian Papyrus (_Rhein. Mus._ xlix. 45 ff.), to say, as he does so, περονῶ σου τὸν ἐγκέφαλον, so in the Attic tablets he says (54) τὴν γλῶτταν καταδῶ χεῖρα αὑτοῦ καταδῶ, and drives a nail or nails through the leaden tablet bearing the words. Again, as in course of time the piercing or melting of the waxen image comes to be regarded not as effective in itself but as merely symbolical of the effect which is to be produced, and the words come to be ‘haec ut cera liquescit, sic nostro Daphnis amore’, so in the ‘defixionum tabellae’ (e. g. _C. I. L._ viii, suppl. n. 12511), after the gods have been adjured, and the order given κατάδησον αὑτῶν τὰ σκέλη κτλ., then, to make it quite clear, it is explained that the legs and hands and head of the victim are to be ‘defixed’ or nailed down in the same way as the feet and hands and head of this fowl: ὡς οὗτος ὁ ἀλέκτωρ καταδέδεται τοῖς ποσὶ καὶ ταῖς χερσὶ καὶ τῇ κεφαλῇ, οὔτως καταδήσατε τὰ σκέλη καὶ τὰς χεῖρας καὶ τὴν κεφαλὴν καὶ τὴν καρδίαν Βικτωρικοῦ τοῦ ἡνιόχου. This tablet, which was found in Carthage, is late, and the adjuration is made in the name of the god of heaven that sits upon the Cherubim, τοῦ καθημένου ἐπὶ τῶν Χερουβί. What is noticeable in this tablet and some others of similar date and style is that they contain no allegation that the person on whose behalf the magic is worked and constraint is put upon the gods has been wronged. On the other hand, in the earlier and Attic tablets, especially those which tend in effect to become prayers, the ground of appeal to the gods is some wrong that has been done. Thus 98 ends with the words, φίλη Γῆ βοήθει μοι’ ἀδικούμενος γὰρ ὑπὸ Εὐρυπτολέμου καὶ Ξενοφῶντος καταδῶ αὐτούς. Or it may be some injury that is feared: εἴ τι μέλλειε ὑπὲρ Φίλωνος ῥῆμα μοχθηρὸν φθέγγεσθαι, then τὴν γλῶσσαν καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτῶν κέντησον (97). In Cyprus if what an adversary might say is feared, then the powers invoked are adjured to muzzle him: φιμώσουσιν τὸν ἀντίδικον ἐμοῦ, and the exorcism is termed a φιμωτικοῦ καταθέματος, or a παραθήκην φιμωτικήν. It is, of course, probable, we may even venture to say certain, that in these tablets the appeal to the justice of the gods is essentially religious in its character. And in that case the combination, in these tablets, of magic with religion shows that in the minds of some worshippers of the gods there was no irreconcilable opposition between magic and religion. On the contrary, the feeling evidently was that the gods might properly be invoked to favour and bless a magical rite, just as they might be prayed to assist any other steps of a more ordinary nature that might be taken. Magic is but one way or means of effecting your end; and it is a means which is just as efficacious for a good end as it is for an evil purpose. The magician is a person who has power, which he may use for evil, or may use for good. He may use his power to cause sickness or to bring misfortune. But he may use it to avert sickness and to muzzle the mouth of the evil-doer. He may use it to make rain, and, while doing so, may pray to the gods for the same purpose. Such a man may have, as he is certainly often believed to have, extraordinary personal power; and there is no obvious reason why he should not pray to the gods to exercise that power in accordance with their will. But he can only pray to the gods if there are gods to whom he can pray. On the other hand, even where there are such gods, he may prefer--and if his purpose be such as the gods condemn, he must prefer--to disregard the gods or, if needs be, to put constraint upon them. That is to say, the extraordinary personal power which he possesses, or is believed to possess, is not in itself either necessarily religious or necessarily irreligious. It may become, or come to be regarded as, either the one or the other. If it is regarded, or rather so far as it is regarded, as irreligious it is condemned: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ is exactly paralleled by the Athenian law quoted by Demosthenes, φαρμακέα καὶ φαρμακίδα, καὶ αὐτοὺς καὶ τὸ γένος ἅπαν ἀποκτεῖναι (_c. Aristogit._ i. 793). If we start from this point of view nothing seems more reasonable than to assert a fundamental opposition between magic and religion. On the other hand, if we consider the beneficent use which is made of magic and the fact that, as in the defixion tablets already quoted, magic and religion may and do work harmoniously together, the relation between them does not seem to be fundamentally one of opposition. The fact would seem to be that this extraordinary personal power, as it is in itself neither good nor bad, but becomes the one or the other according as it is used for good ends or for bad, so it is in itself neither magical nor religious but comes to be regarded as religious if used in the service of the gods, and as magic if used otherwise. But it is not until gods are believed in that this power can be used in their service or regarded as their gift: only when belief in the gods has arisen can the person possessing power be regarded as having derived his power from them, or believe himself so to have derived it. It may well be that his power confirms his belief and strengthens it; it may perhaps even be that his power is the first thing to awaken him to belief in gods and to the possibility of communing with them in his heart. But the belief that there are superior beings, with whom it is possible to commune in one’s heart, is not the same thing as the extraordinary personal power which some men exert over others. Such belief and such power may indeed go together, but they do not by any means always go together; and accordingly the power cannot be regarded as the cause of the belief.

Again, it is not until men come to believe that there are gods, who have the interests of their worshippers at heart, that the man who possesses this power and uses it for evil purposes can be condemned by the opinion of the community as one who works against the community, and therefore against the god who protects the community. In other words, we may say that this extraordinary personal power does not come to be regarded as magic--indeed, that magic does not come into existence--until religion has come into existence. When exercised by ‘a man of God’, it is religious; when exerted by any one else it is magical. The magician may use, and more often than not, does use his power in a way injurious to other members of the community, and therefore offensive to the god under whose protection they are. From this point of view, therefore, we may justifiably speak of a fundamental opposition between magic and religion. On the other hand, though the magician ordinarily uses his power to injure people, he is not restricted to this use of it. His power may be used to recall an errant lover, as it is by the lady in the Hadrumetan tablet already quoted, or for the recovery of lost or stolen property. One of the ‘defixion’ tablets is directed to the recovery of τὸ ἱμάτιον τὸ πελλόν, τὸ ἔλαβεν ὁ δεῖνα καὶ οὐκ ἀποδίδωτι καὶ ἀρνεῖται καὶ χρῆται (_I. G. S. I._ 644), another seeks to recover τὰ ὑπ’ ἐμοῦ καταλίφθεντα ἱμάτια καὶ ἔνδυμα (Bechtel, 3537) or τὴν σπατάλην ἢν ἀπώλεσα ἐν τοῖς κήποις τοῖε Ῥοδοκλεῦς (Bechtel, 3541). The magician, that is to say, may use his power for innocent and even laudable purposes. Hence it is that magic is not wholly condemned by any community in which it flourishes; and hence it is that we find magic reinforced by religion not only in the _defixionum tabellae_, as has already been pointed out, but in numerous rites of uncultured peoples, and from time to time, as survivals, in the religious ceremonies of civilized nations. If we dwell upon this set of facts exclusively, we shall be in danger of inferring, not a fundamental opposition but a fundamental identity between magic and religion. Yet, as we have seen, the opposition is quite as marked as the similarity; and this seems to indicate that the extraordinary personal power which some men possess, or are believed to possess, is fundamentally the same, whether it is, or whether it is not, exercised in the service of the gods of the community; but the spirit in which it is used, when employed in the one way, is fundamentally opposed to that in which it is used in the other. Such power may in the course of evolution come to be regarded, or come to manifest itself, either as religious or as magical. But in itself, and at the start, inasmuch as it may become either hereafter, it is at the beginning neither. It is the power--whether of ‘suggestion’ or of actual control--which some exceptional men exercise over others.

LECTURE V

HERODOTUS AND ANTHROPOLOGY

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]