The same Archelaus is credited—or discredited—with another saying, characteristic of the Milesian way of looking at Mankind:—‘Justice and injustice,’ he said, ‘exist not in nature but in custom.’ Here again, the practice of Herodotus is instructive. Repeatedly he notes of distant peoples either that they are the ‘justest of Mankind’, or that they have this or that ‘custom’ which is praiseworthy or the reverse; and, even among the highest of civilized beings, ‘Custom is King.’
This is not perhaps the place to enter at length on a discussion of the Herodotean usage of νόμος, or its relation with its correlative φύσις. But it can hardly be passed by without the remark that the varying use of the word in Herodotus—and his uses do vary in detail—are all included in that earlier, and characteristically Ionian sense, in which the word is used to denote the formal expression of what actually happens, among the people, and in the circumstances, which are in question. This is of course a quite immediate, and very early sense of the word; it connects itself directly with the primary signification of a pasture within which a flock may roam unchecked and unharmed, but beyond which it strays at its peril or not at all. Νόμος has thus exactly the force of the Roman conception of a provincia, except that where provincia prescribed the limits and the character of appropriate acts, νόμος merely described them. In so far then as νὁμος answered originally to our word law, it answered exclusively to that sense of it in which we speak of a law of nature, meaning thereby our more or less accurate formulation, in a descriptive way, of the actual course of events of the given type.
In this sense obviously there is no contrast or antagonism conceivable between νόμος and φύσις. Let the φύσις of an oak, for example—the growth-process of that kind of tree—be to put forth branches, leaves, and fruit of a specific sort: this is no less the νόμος of that oak; the way it normally behaves. So, too, with Man. The normal, natural behaviour of the Egyptian is to teach his son a trade, this is one of his νόμοι, as seen and described by an observer from outside; but this is also what he and his ancestors have done φύσει for generations, till an Egyptian who does otherwise is hardly conceivable. We have already seen in the case of Hippocrates the mode of procedure whereby what began as a νόμος was conceived as modifying the φύσις by incorporation in it.
What was the outcome of these observations on the family structure of savages, and of the speculations as to their ‘naturalness’ or the reverse? The answer is given, I think, when we look into the fourth century, and find Socrates, the last of the pre-Socratics, propounding in the Republic, and justifying by chapter and verse in the Laws, the unnaturalness, because the uselessness or inexpediency, of patriarchal society as the Greeks knew it. From Athenian politics patriarchal considerations had been eliminated in theory a century before, by that amazing revolutionary, Cleisthenes; but socially the father still owned and ruled his children; and children paid divided allegiance to their father and to the state. As presented in the Republic the Socratic argument has little about it that is anthropological; the appeal is to horses and dogs, not to Sarmatians; but the actual institutions of the Ideal State, the annual mating-festivals, the κομψοὶ κλῆροι by which status is allotted to each infant after inspection by the governors, the whole classificatory system of relationship, are one and all to be found among the curious νόμοι which we know to have been recorded by the anthropologists of the century before; and recorded, too, with the definite intention of discovering what their causes were, and what were the reasons assigned for those customs by the people who practised and understood them.
It is against such speculations as these, of course, and in particular against the Socratic attempt to make Amazons and Nasamonians rise up in judgement against this generation, that Aristotle was moved to restate in the first section of the Politics the orthodox sociology of patriarchal Greece. That in the middle of the fourth it should have been possible for a serious person to maintain the paradox φύσει ἀρχικὸς πατὴρ υἱῶν without instant refutation by the members of his classroom, is a measure of the extent to which the followers of Socrates (though, as we have seen, not Socrates himself) had broken with the fifth-century naturalists, and perhaps even ceased to read them. But it is a measure also of the extent to which an able dialectician could make play with words like φύσις and νόμος, till it almost appeared as if any one who had any νόμοι to speak of represented a παρέκβασις from the φύσει ἄνθρωπος. No amount of a priori argument as to the superior strength, or intelligence, or sheer ‘superiority’ of the human male, could obliterate the fact that here women ruled, there they fought, elsewhere they did the work instead of the man, or, bar the reflection, that it was the business of an editor of συνηγμέναι πολιτεῖαι to collect these human institutions too, before generalizing; and, in general, to distinguish τὸ παρὰ φύσιν from τὸ παράδοξον.
Alongside of the problem of family organization, lay the other problem of the means of subsistence. Some men live wholly on the fruit of a tree; others eat corn, or milk, or monkeys, or their elderly relatives. And here again the evidence falls into two classes. There are customs in which the eating appears to us as a ritual act designed by those who observed or initiated it to secure some ultimately useful end: they frequently belong to the kind of acts which we class together as Sympathetic Magic. There are also customs in respect of food, which to us appear to have only an economic interest; or if they have wider interest at all, acquire it from another consideration. Current anthropology—French anthropology in particular—and our own economic surroundings combine to bring home to us keenly the thought that the way in which a people gets its daily bread, not to mention the previous question how it is to get anything to eat at all (except, perhaps, its own unemployables), has a direct and profound influence on its social structure. A late stage of Greek thought on this subject is represented by the section in the first book of the Politics which classifies the principal βίοι which are open to mankind, and hints (though the subject is not pursued) that the Good Life will be pursued with a very different equipment of customs and institutions according as it is pursued by the pastoral nomad ‘farming his migratory field’, or by the miner, or by the merchant seaman. A little earlier in thought as well as in time comes the sketch in the Republic, a glimpse of the earlier Socrates who had dabbled in geography and improved the ‘inventions’ of Archelaus. The later Socrates, wise in his own failures, takes his pupils hurriedly past this avenue of inquiry into the structure of society; the disciples, for the credit of the Master’s originality, omit all allusion to Archelaus and his work. But the Milesian who began with Physics, and went on to show what nowadays we should call ‘the applicability of biological laws to Man’, cannot have been without weight in the political thought of his time; and it is again to Herodotus that we must turn for indications of the extent to which this inquiry was already being followed in Greece in the generation of Archelaus, and before it.
Already in Homer imagination had been caught by the total distinctness of the mode of life which was followed by the nomads of the North; and a vague connexion had been felt between the purely pastoral existence and a peculiarly orderly habit of life and behaviour. A fragment of Choerilus, whom those who had access to his work felt to stand in some peculiarly close relation to Herodotus, connects these two qualities explicitly;[108] and the same thought recurs twice over in that storehouse of anthropological learning, the Prometheus Solutus of Aeschylus.[109] In the latter passage it would be forcing the literal sense of the words unduly, to insist that the Gabii are to be pictured as living on wild corn, especially as Greek theory was at all other points unanimous that corn, like the olive and the vine, came to man by special providence as something ἡμερον φύσει. The Aeschylean picture clearly is that of the virgin soil of the trans-Euxine grassland, where the spring vegetation will endure comparison with any merely Aegean cornland.
There is enough in this single example to show that the men of the early fifth century were already aware of the inter-dependence of environment, economy, and institutions. For the generation of Socrates, we have the treatise of Hippocrates already mentioned, ‘On Air, Water, and Places’; of which the whole burden is, as we have seen, that not only men’s social organization, but their very physique, is the result of ‘acquired variations’ initiated by the climate and economic régime.
I hinted, a little earlier, that there is another reason why Herodotus should pay close attention to the peculiar food of strange peoples. That different kinds of food-quest should lead to different manners and institutions was probably, even in the fifth century, a less familiar conception than that the personal qualities of the individual depended directly on the food which he ate. This is of course a matter of elementary knowledge to most savages; it is an explicit principle of the medical doctrine of Hippocrates; it has had the profoundest influence on the vocabulary and ritual of great religions, and it has by no means disappeared from the current thought of mankind; it is still believed, by otherwise intelligent people, that the morals of nations may be mended, by defining the quality of their food and the quantity of their drink. With this conception in mind, we shall cease to be surprised that Herodotus devotes so much time and care to describe the preparation of plum-cake, or kirschwasser, or beer. Man might not live by bread alone; but if you once were certain that a man did live on bread, and not on monkeys, or on lice, you knew already a good deal about the habits and the value of that man.
It was probably the circumstance that this magical interpretation was so commonly attached to food-supply that prevented Greek observers, such as Herodotus and Hippocrates, from pressing home their analysis of the food-quest as an index of the general economic régime. And the same ambiguity envelops also, unfortunately, the next recorded attempt at such analysis. It can hardly be accident that, in the sketch of the ἀναγκαιοτάτη πόλις in the Republic,[110] the diet of the citizens is wholly vegetarian, and almost wholly cereal. And when Glaucon interrupts, and asks what has happened to the meat, Socrates wilfully misunderstands his question, and prescribes once more only salt, cheese, and vegetable relishes—olives, and bulbous roots, and wild herbs, with figs, lentils, and beans, myrtle-berries and forest nuts to follow. Glaucon’s comment on this is precise and contemptuous: ‘If you had been planning a city of pigs, Socrates, what other fodder than this would you have given them?’ And on being pressed for an alternative, he stipulates expressly for the customary food of civilized men, ‘and meat dishes such as people have nowadays.’ It is entirely in keeping with all this,[111] that ὄψα recur further on, along with tables, chairs, and unguents, as signs of a corrupted state; that hunters and cooks appear among the ministers of luxury; and swineherds last of all, for the pig alone among cattle gives neither milk or cheese, but is useful only for meat diet.