The Human Race

by Louis Figuier

In general, what we have said at the commencement of this chapter, applies to them with but little modification.

The Greek Family.

The Greek family comprises the Greeks and the Albanians. These races derive their origin from the ancient tribes known under the name of Pelasgians. The ancient Greeks founded many colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean.

In the fourth century before Christ, led by Alexander, they subdued part of Asia, and carried their victorious arms into Egypt. But these conquests were ephemeral. The Greek empire was in its turn subjugated by other races, of whom the principal were the Romans, the Slavonians, and the Scythians.

In the present day the Greeks compose but a scanty population, concentrated in the Morea, or scattered in the neighbouring districts. The majority of the people of this race who inhabit the Asiatic continent have adopted even the language of their neighbours, and are merely reputed Greeks because they profess the Greek form of the Christian religion.

The ancient Greeks, civilized by intercourse with Egyptian colonists, already afforded an example of advanced culture, at a time when the other European and Asiatic nations were still immersed in barbarism.

In spite of the misfortunes of a social decay destined to terminate in many centuries of subjection, the Greeks have preserved up to our own day the physical characteristics of their ancestors. Everyone knows that the most beautiful development of the brow, the finest shape of the human head, is that we find traced in the sculpture of ancient Greece. It had been supposed that the magnificent heads with the noble outlines, admired in the statues of the Greeks, were not the exact reproduction of nature, and that some features had been exaggerated in the direction of ideal beauty. But, in our own day, the skulls of ancient Greeks have been found whose proportions and whose general outlines demonstrate, that, among the artists of ancient Greece, sculpture did not surpass nature, but restricted its inspiration to types who actually lived.

The Apollo Belvidere can therefore be considered as a model, but slightly idealized by art, of the general physiognomy of the ancient Greeks. In his “Travels in the Morea,” M. Pouqueville gives a description of the physiognomy of the present Greeks, which enables us to judge of the surprising persistence of the most beautiful types, even in the midst of a social condition so deeply modified.

“The inhabitants of the Morea,” says M. Pouqueville, “are generally tall and well made. Their eyes are full of fire, their mouth is admirably well formed and full of the most beautiful teeth. The women of Sparta are fair, slender, and dignified in carriage. The women of Taygetus have the gait of Pallas . . . . The Messenian girl is conspicuous for her plumpness; she has regular features, large eyes, and long black hair; the damsel of Arcadia, hidden under her coarse woollen garments, scarcely allows the regularity of her figure to be perceived . . . .”

Here, besides, are the characteristics displayed in their sculpture, and which, according to what we have said, may really be considered those of the Greek type.