There was another reason, besides, why traditions of common descent should seem to deserve tender treatment, even when geographical probability was against them. The whole Eastern Mediterranean was still but imperfectly recovering itself after one of those periods of prolonged and intense ethnic stress to which it is exposed by the permeability of its northern frontier. From Thrace to Crete there were fragmentary patches of Pelasgians; Phrygians from Macedon to Peloponnese, far up the Adriatic, and in Western Sicily; Thracians in Naxos and Attica; and Lydians at Askalon. The Ionian merchant, like the Venetian of a later time, found everywhere before him the tracks of the crusading Achaean. The Dorian Spartan in Cyprus, at Soli and Kerynia, found Kurion already the colony of an earlier Argos; at Tarentum he merely filled a vacant niche in an Achaean, almost a Homeric Italy. If things like these could happen within four or five hundred years, γένοιτο δ’ ἂν πᾶν ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῷ. Outside the Greek world it was the same. Where Sesostris had been, the Scythian and Kimmerian had followed, leaving their trail at Sinope and Askalon, as he in Colchis. Nebuchadnezzar had set the Jews by the waters of Babylon. Darius was but following the rule when he moved Paeonians to Asia Minor, and transplanted Eretrians to Ardericca.
There was another reason also why racial type should be held liable to easy change. The Greeks themselves, and most of their neighbours, were mongrel peoples, for reasons which we have just seen; and there is no doubt that climate and mode of life were actually resulting in ruthless and rapid elimination of intrusive types, wherever these were intolerant of Mediterranean conditions. Now in most of the states of Ionia the blood of the citizens was mixed beyond hope of disentanglement, even by family tradition; for family tradition, as Professor Murray has shown us,[102] was for the most part shattered in the migrations. Yet the external conditions were the same for all; and men saw their blonder kinsmen and townsmen fade and cease out of the land, without fully realizing that what needed explanation was not their failure to survive, but their presence in those latitudes at all. The result, for ethnology, was to encourage a belief that mankind in itself was a pure-bred species, one and indivisible like any other natural kind; and that the marked variations between white and black, straight-haired and woolly-haired peoples, were exclusively the result of climatic, if not human, selection.
Yet another consideration drove men’s thoughts inevitably in the same connexion. One of the best inheritances of Greece from the Minoan world was an elaborate apparatus of cultivated plants and animals: our evidence from dogs, and olive-kernels, begins, I think, to justify this view.[103] And in so minutely subdivided a region, special breeds of local origin were bound to result at an early phase of industry; and to be compared and discussed in the markets and on the quays. Every one knew, in fact, that domesticated animals and plants, under human direction, were tolerant of almost infinite and very rapid alteration: and Man himself is the most highly domesticated of all. It is no wonder then that in the fourth century Socrates is represented as arguing habitually as if Man were a domesticated animal, whose breed could be improved at will, and in any direction, physical or psychological. For even psychological breeding had long been reduced to an art, both with horses and with dogs.
Demonstrable migrations of men, therefore, and demonstrable mutations both of men and of animals, offered evidence of a kind which it was difficult to overlook, that natural characters were variable, and also that acquired ones could become hereditary. It was, in fact, not because the Greeks knew so little, but because on certain crucial points they already knew so much, that they formed the views they did as to the instability of human varieties. How far these views were pressed to their conclusions will be seen best, I think, from a glance at the teaching of Hippocrates, which we may safely take to be near the highwater-mark of fifth-century thought on immediately pre-Socratic lines.
A good example of the doctrine of Hippocrates is contained in his anthropology of the Phasis valley, a region which falls sufficiently within the same limits as the Colchis of Herodotus to be worth comparing with his description of the Colchians. Indeed there is some reason to believe that, for reasons both of geographical theory and of popular ideas of utility, this corner of Hither Asia was attracting a good deal of learned attention from the physicists of Greece. This is what Hippocrates[104] has to say about the Phasis and its people. ‘That country is marshy and warm and well watered and thickly clothed with vegetation, and there is heavy and violent rainfall there at all seasons, and the habitat of its men is in the marshes, and their houses are of wood and rushes ingeniously erected in the water, and they do but little walking to and from town and market, but they sail to and fro in dug-out canoes. For there are numerous artificial canals. The waters they drink are warm and stagnant and putrefied by the sun, and replenished by the rains. The Phasis itself too is the most stagnant of all rivers, and of the gentlest current. And the fruits which grow there are all unwholesome, for they are effeminated [he is thinking of the abundance of fleshy pulpy fruit, like the stone fruits—plums, apricots, and nectarines—which were characteristic of this region in antiquity] and flabby by reason of the abundance of water. And that is why they do not ripen fully. And much mist envelops the country as a result of the water. For just these reasons the Phasians have their bodily forms different from those of all other men. For in stature they are tall, in breadth they are excessively broad, and no joint or vein is to be seen upon them. Their complexion is yellow as if they had the jaundice. Their voice is the deepest of all men’s, because their atmosphere is not clear but foggy and moist. And for bodily exertion they are naturally somewhat disinclined.’
Here we see an unqualified doctrine of the plasticity of human nature, physical and mental, under the influence of climate and geographical environment, such as his description of the Scythians has led us to suspect already. An adjacent passage adds the further theoretical point, that even acquired variations of wholly artificial character may become hereditary in time. The case is that of the Macrocephali, whose haunts unfortunately are not specified.[105] ‘In the beginning it was their custom which was chiefly responsible for the length of their head, but now, their mode of growth too reinforces their custom. For they regard as best bred those who have the longest head.’ Then he describes how the heads are remodelled in infancy by massage and bandaging; and proceeds: ‘At the beginning the practice itself had the result that their mode of growth was of this kind. But as time went on, it came to be inbred so that their law was no longer compulsory:’ ἐν φύσει ἐγένετο, ὤστε τὸν νόμον μηκέτι ἀναγκάζειν. He then explains that just as baldness and grey eyes and physical deformities are hereditary (for he makes no distinction between natural and acquired varieties), ‘now similarly they do not grow at all as they did before: for the practice has no longer any force, through the people’s own neglect of it.’
The bearing of this passage, and the doctrine which it expounds, on Herodotus’ account of the Colchi, will be obvious at once. Clearly, if the proportions of the head can be affected by artificial pressure, reinforced by social selection of the most successfully deformed—that is to say, of the individuals with the softest skulls; and if, as Hippocrates clearly thought, the colour of the eyes, and presence or absence of hair, were characters of the same order of transmissibility; and if, further, as in the case of the Phasians, skin-colour and bodily proportions resulted from climate and occupation; then clearly it mattered comparatively little to Herodotus whether the Colchians were woolly-haired or not. Woolly hair, like baldness, could be inherited indeed; but it could also be superinduced, like macrocephaly, by assiduous curling, or, as every barber knows, by the subtler influence of atmospheric moisture. It is consequently not only because, as suggested above, there were other woolly-haired people, besides the Egyptians and Colchians who were in question, that Herodotus has recourse to other evidence than that of physique to prove their identity: it is because, for fifth-century anthropology, the evidence of physique itself did not justify conclusions of appreciably higher validity than those which resulted from the comparison of industries or customs.
It will be seen from all this that in questions relating to the evolution of Man, Herodotus exhibits—and shares with the whole thought of his time—precisely the opposite weakness to that of the pioneers of modern anthropology. His mistakes arise, not because he is unable to allow time enough for evolutionary changes, but because he tries to crowd too great an amplitude of change into the liberal allowance of time which he is prepared to grant. Ten thousand years, or even twenty thousand, would be a short allowance, in modern geology, for even so active a river as the Nile to fill up the whole Red Sea; but it is more than double the whole length allotted to ‘geological time’ within the memory of men still living.
It will also be clear how deep was the impression created on the Greek mind by the minor changes of the seasons and of history. The formula of Heracleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει, had indeed its application to metaphysic; but its origin was in physical science, as a generalization from experience. It had its negative interest as an implement of sceptical destruction. But it had also a high positive value, for it formulated the present as transitional from the past to the future; it emphasized the kinetic and physiological aspect of nature and of science, which has ever been of so far higher value, in research, as in life, than the static and morphological; it substituted an analysis of processes for classification of the qualities of things.
Now it is to this phase of scientific theory that we must assign the first intrusion into scientific terminology of the twin words φύσις and νόμος; in their primitive sense they denote nothing else than precisely such natural processes in themselves, on the one hand, and man’s formulation of such processes, on the other.