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.