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]
The ground thus cleared, Hippocrates notes four points. In the first place beardlessness, and its reputed concomitants, were limited to Scythians of wealth, which he explains to be synonymous with hereditary rank; or at least were most common among these. Hippocrates, it is true, puts this down to their equestrian habit, not to a difference of race. Yet it is clear, from Herodotus’ account, that the Scythian aristocracy were the result of a quite recent irruption of a purely nomad people from beyond the Tanais, which had displaced, though not wholly, the former population of Scythia. Secondly, he observes that the Scythians in general differ wholly in physique from the rest of the peoples of Europe; but he does not on that ground raise the question of an immigrant origin. The reason for this omission, however, is clear from his third point, that the abnormality in question is such as might be predicted from a consideration of the climate and mode of life of any human inhabitants of Scythia. After this, his fourth point brings him right up to the brink of discovery, though it is not pressed to its logical conclusion by further research; for he is clear both that the beardlessness could exist without further disabilities, and also that, in addition to climate and customs conducive to this bodily habit, the Scythians were naturally inclined to be beardless. But the first of these facts he ascribes, not without professional excuse, to successful preventive treatment; and the latter was clearly regarded by him as the incipient effect of climate and the like upon persons who were congenitally normal. It is curious, meanwhile, that he does not make use of the crucial instance of the beardless Scythians at Askalon, to test his conclusion that beardlessness and the like are the effect of climate; for the climate of Askalon differs from that of Scythia in almost every important particular. It is permissible, however, to suggest that we have here one of the numerous instances in which important statements are recorded by Herodotus, which, whether true or false in themselves, failed for some reason to become assimilated by the learned world of the fourth century.
Herodotus, however, was still anything but satisfied as to the paramount value of the physical criterion of kinship. In the majority of cases it proved either too much or too little. A good instance is his comparison of the Colchians with the Egyptians. Here he bases his argument for their affinity on their common physical characters, dark skin and woolly hair. But this proves too much: there are other peoples with dark skin and woolly hair, who are certainly not of Egyptian origin. On the other hand it proves too little; for what he proposes to establish here is not a general community of origin, but direct Egyptian colonization within historic times. For this proof, he prefers to rely on the evidence of a ceremonial custom which he regards as typically African; for it is both Egyptian and Aethiopian; and, as it happens to be a custom involving mutilation of the person, it belongs, as we shall see presently, to a class of observances which were regarded by Greek anthropology as competent to effect real changes of physique in course of time. The merely external evidence of a common industry, such as the linen-weaving which he adduces here, clearly stands for Herodotus on a lower plane, along with their general similarity of culture and language.
Clearly Herodotus was not quite satisfied as to the value of racial types in anthropology. And there were several reasons for this. On the one hand, the Greeks themselves held family tradition to be good evidence of common descent; and as a matter of fact, the professional genealogist had been beforehand with the anthropologist at nearly all points within the Greek-speaking world. Traditions of common descent, in fact, were too deeply fixed already in popular belief, and involved too many practical questions, such as the rights to real property, or to political privilege, to be treated as anything but valid evidence of kinship. Consequently a people’s own account of their origin, or whatever story was accepted as such, was held to be evidence of a high order. Such price did Greek science pay for the actual solidarity of Greek phylic institutions.
For example, the Sigynnae of the Middle Danube ‘say that they are a colony of Medes. How they have come to be a colony of Medes, I for my part cannot say for certain: yet anything might happen if you give it long enough’.[101] Herodotus is prepared, that is, to allow infinite time to accomplish an almost impossible migration, rather than give up what he accepts as a people’s own account of their origin. But obviously this principle of ethnography was likely to lead to great difficulties. The Sigynnae, it is true, wore ‘Median dress’, presumably trousers of some kind, and perhaps a shaped cap with ear-guards, no less suitable to a Danubian than to a Median winter. But what of their physique? In this instance Herodotus gives no details; but clearly if conflict were to occur between the evidence for descent and for physique—if, that is, a people claimed descent from another people of a different physical type—it might be the difference of physique which would stand in need of explanation.