It is the more important to keep in mind this fundamental conception of Greek physical anthropology when we go on to consider either the treatment of the evidence of language and culture, which we find in Herodotus, or the applications of physical classification to the purposes of logic and metaphysic. To take the latter first: a doctrine of the real existence of natural kinds, corresponding each, as Hippocrates would put it, to a process of growth peculiar to itself, was clearly easier to understand, if not to discover and formulate, when the men who were to discuss it were already brought up to regard the animal world, for example, as consisting of a comparatively small number of fundamental types, and the infinite variety of individual and regional forms as the effect of external forces upon them. Each actual example of horse or dog, for example, was to be regarded on the one hand as the embodiment of a true equine or canine nature, which reason might hope to detect and isolate; but on the other, it lay like the god Glaucus, encrusted with accidental qualities, the effects of its exposure to a particular environment. Seen in the light of their pre-Socratic history, as elements in the terminology of a great school of naturalists, the catch-words φύσις, γένος, εἶδος, and συμβεβηκὸς gain something, I think, in significance. In particular, it becomes clearer why the word εἶδος, which continued to be used among the naturalists for the specific outcome of συμβεβηκότα upon a member or members of a γένος, came among the philosophers to supersede the word γἑνος in proportion as the centre of reflective interest shifted from the objective exponent of a φύσις to the subjective standpoint of the philosophic observer.
For Herodotus, meanwhile, language and culture can change under stress of circumstances in just the same way as physique; and therefrom follows the possibility of the transmission of culture. Whether any particular custom was to be regarded as innate in the φύσις of those who practised it, or as their response to the stresses of their present environment, or as the result, whether conformable to the environment or not, of intercourse with another variety of Man, was a question to be settled on the merits of each case. It was, in fact, partly the laxness of interest in such matters which resulted from the prevalent theory, and only partly the admitted incompleteness of the observations, that kept ethnographical speculation in so backward a state as we find it in Herodotus’ time. Until the belief in stronger specific characters could be supplemented by some doctrine of cultural momentum, the conception of progress in civilization was hardly attainable at all. This is where the treatment of Hellenic civilization by Herodotus stands in so marked a contrast with his treatment of the civilizations of Egypt and Outland. Egyptian civilization, like Egypt itself, is the gift of the Nile; the φύσις of an Indian attains its τέλος when he has ridden his camels and rescued his gold; the men are black, or tall, or longlived as the effect of natural causes; and as long as these causes persist, so long will there be Indians or Aethiopians with those qualities. Only in Greece is there mastery of man over nature, and that not because nature is less strong, but because Greek man is strong enough to dominate it.
This is how it comes about that barriers of language and of culture, no less than barriers of descent, are powerless in face of a well-defined γένος with a potent φύσις of its own. Such a γἑνος can add to the number of individuals which compose it. Pelasgians and Lelegians can become Hellenes. For Herodotus, as I have explained more in detail elsewhere, the process of conversion of barbarians to the Hellenic φύσις is not clear: the verbs which he employs, μετέβαλον, μετέμαθον, are intransitive; the general impression which is conveyed is of a kind of spontaneous generation: and the same language is used when τὸ Ἐλληνικόν is described as ἀποσχισθὲν ἀπὸ τοῦ βαρβἀρου, in the earliest phase of all. For Thucydides, on the other hand—as was natural to an Athenian who had seen Atticism triumphant in Hellas—Hellenism is acquired by contact with, and imitation of, the φύσις of a genuine Hellene. Of course this explanation of Pelasgian conversion only pushes the problem itself one stage further back; but it marks a distinct advance in analysis beyond the point reached by Herodotus; and it is an advance in precisely the opposite direction to that in which naturalists like Hippocrates were being led through their greater insistence on the external factors, which were the main subject of their study. Thucydides in fact stands already on the Socratic side of the line. The explanation of the transmissibility of culture is to be sought for him not in physiology, but in psychology—not in spontaneous or coercive adjustment to inexorable nature, but in intercourse with enlightened minds.
Among the many different classes of information which Herodotus inclines to give about foreign peoples, two kinds of data are more insistently recorded than the others. There are the marriage customs, and the principal source of food. These will be admitted to be obvious points to note; but there was a special motive in the fifth century for collecting each of them; and the history of thought in the century which followed allows us to trace this motive forward into a maturer context.
The problem of the status of the sexes in society was not a new one in fourth-century Greece. As far back, indeed, as we can trace social institutions directly at all, society in Greece had been constituted on patriarchal lines. But patriarchal institutions had far less undisputed acceptance in the Greek world than they had for example in Italy. It was not merely that Attic rules of inheritance gave a definite, though at all times secondary, status to the mother’s kindred; or that in Sparta, Thebes, and some other states, the women enjoyed in many respects a social equality with the men which has been explained in more ways than one. An Ionian Greek had only to travel down his own coast as far as Lycia to find men reckoning descent through the mother, or to travel back in imagination to the legendary origins of his own people, to find that their pedigrees went often up, not to a god, but to a woman. Olympian society was the same. The consort of Zeus held a very different position from that of the wife in a patriarchal household; and on the Asiatic shore, at least, the gods themselves were traced back to a Mother, not to a Father, of them all.
Hints, too, were not wanting as to the recent arrival, and un-Aegean origin, of the patriarchal system, which had now prevailed, with its proprietary view of women; and, no less, of the loose hold which this set of customs had upon the popular belief and opinion. In the opening chapters of his history, Herodotus states, and allows his Περσέων λὁγιοι to criticize freely, what might be summarized as a cherchez-la-femme theory of the Eastern Question: and the criticism which he records amounts essentially to the question, ‘Does the position of women in society, as we know it, justify the attempts which have been made to explain the great quarrel by incidents such as those of Io, Medea, and Helen?’ Now this criticism is not merely Persian, nor even Herodotean; the problem whether the Trojan War was really fought about Helen was at least as old as Stesichorus. No sooner did the wakening mind of Hellas cease merely to believe Homer, and begin to think about him, than it struck at once upon this very paradox:—‘Homer says, and insists throughout, that all the war was wrought for Helen’s sake; but do we Greeks ever dream of doing anything of the kind? are our women the least worth fighting about? If they run away with a foreigner, do we not, as a matter of fact, say “good riddance”, and go about our business?’ How this paradox presented itself to Stesichorus and to other literary thinkers of early Greece, and how Herodotus has chosen to handle their solution of it, is a thrice-told tale. All that I am concerned to suggest, at present, is that, at every point where we can test it, opinion in Greece was in flux as to the rightful position of woman in civilized society.
The rapid extension of the field of Greek knowledge of other peoples’ customs, which resulted from the voyages and settlements of the seventh century, no less than the severe strain which the economic evolution in that century and the next put upon the very framework of society in Greek states, led inevitably, as we know, to very reasonable scepticism as to the naturalness of patriarchal institutions in themselves: and this not only among the Physicists. We have hints of it in the Lyric, and explicit discussion in the Drama. ‘Is a man nearer akin to his father or to his mother?’ that is the point on which for Aeschylus the fate of Orestes turns in the last resort. The Apollo of Aeschylus, Λητοίδης though he be, is on the side of the angels, but his proof belongs to a phase of observation which, while it conforms precisely to the patriarchal jurisprudence, was obsolete already for Hippocrates. The Andromache and the Medea of Euripides mark in due course the turn of the tide, even in Drama; and, with the feminist plays of Aristophanes, we are in full course for the Republic of Plato, the fine flower, on this side of the subject, of the conviction (which is really pre-Socratic) that social organization, like any other, is at bottom a matter of the adaptation of natural means to ends.
Of this controversy Herodotus is no mere spectator. It can hardly be a chance that every one of the strange marriage customs which he mentions happens to be typical of a widespread type of observance; and that the series of them taken together forms an analysis of such types which is almost complete between the extremes of promiscuous union with classificatory relationship on the one hand, and normal patriarchal monogamy on the other.
Herodotus is of course not writing a history of Human Marriage, or of Woman’s Rights; it is only as a current topic of controversy that such matters come into his story at all; but, when they do, I think we can see that his contribution to them is not quite a casual one; that he is not simply emptying an ill-filled notebook on to the margins of his history; but that where he digresses he does so to fill a gap in current knowledge, with materials which, if not new, are at all events well authenticated; and that these materials have partly been elicited by his own interest in specific problems which were burning questions at the moment.
The question of social organization, and provision for orderly descent, was for Herodotus a matter of pure science. But for some of his contemporaries it was different. Archelaus, in particular, the last, and in some respects the most advanced, of the Physicists, has the reputation of having applied physicist methods to politics and morals: καὶ γὰρ περὶ νόμων πεφιλοσόφηκε καὶ καλῶν καὶ δικαίων.[106] Two points in the account given of him by Diogenes have usually been put on one side; that he came from Miletus and had sat at the feet of Anaxagoras, beyond whose physics, however, he failed to advance appreciably;[107] and that Socrates had borrowed from him much of what commonly passed as Socratic. But the two statements go together. An Ionian Physicist, who had passed on to ‘philosophize about customs, their goodness and justice’, was certainly a pendent portrait to that of the Socrates of the Clouds and of the Memorabilia, with his earlier interest (which his enemies never forgot) in τὰ μετέωρα, and his invincible habit of treating Man as an animal species about which it was permissible to argue by the analogy of other ‘rational animals’ like horses and dogs. Indeed the predominant interest which the next generation took in the later phases of Socrates the Moralist, have obscured, perhaps unduly, the significance of these glimpses of his immaturer thought.