Here three distinct lines of argument are inextricably confused. In the first place, we have seen already that it was the regular Greek belief that man began existence as a forest animal, living on the hazel-nuts and acorns characteristic of the Balkan and Anatolian regions; and only acquired the knowledge of corn, wine, and oil by special providence, and at a later time: in this sense, therefore, Socrates is proposing a return to primitive diet. In the second place, the diet which he suggests is the only one possible for people who should try to live a life independent and at the same time inoffensive. But, thirdly, this diet is precisely that which a fourth-century doctor would have been expected to prescribe for a patient τρυφῶντὶ καὶ φλεγμαίνοντι. But there is enough of common motive in all three considerations, to make it clear that even one of the least anthropological among his pupils could represent Socrates as starting from a conception of man and his place in the world which is precisely that of a fifth-century physicist.[112]
I conclude with a well-known Herodotean episode, in which much true history has been remodelled clearly in the light of a definite classification of βίοι, and a definite theory of their relative values and economic interactions. In the story of the rise of Peisistratus, as told by Herodotus,[113] the motif of the action throughout the first phase of his career is that of three contrasted βίοι: the life of the shore, of the sea, and of the men from over the hills. In form the division is geographical, but the phrase which is used, τῷ λόγῳ τῶν ὑπερακρίων προστάς, suggests that it is not a district but a region which is in question; and that what differentiated this region from the others was this, that it lay above corn level. Any one who will go in spring-time and look round from the Acropolis upon Attica, will recognize that abrupt change from the emerald green to the purple and brown, which tells where πεδίον and cornland end, and the goats of the ὑπεράκρια begin. And I have seen along the base of Taygetus, along the same economic frontier, where a track like a coastguard’s path has been worn by the police patrols, in their attempt, not always successful, to prevent στάσις from bursting into πόλεμος. We should note in passing that the question whether the pastoral highlanders of Attica exhausted the whole content of the λόγος τῶν ὐπερακρίων—whether, that is, the party of Peisistratus included the mining interests of the district of Laureion, as suggested by Mr. Ure,[114] is totally distinct from the question now before us, which is simply what the word conveyed to the mind of Herodotus the Halicarnassian. And if this distinction be granted, the suggestion, which is after all the conventional one, that the ground of division between the Attic factions was regarded by Herodotus as an economic one, receives much support from the perennial state of Balkan lands, with their oases of corn-growers amid a highland wilderness of Vlachs.
In these circumstances, the fact that Peisistratus, whatever his real character may have been, is described as the leader of the most backward section of the population, is entirely in agreement with the rest of the picture. For throughout, in Herodotus’ presentation of him, Peisistratus is the man of paradoxes. His father, before his birth, had accepted the omen of the cauldron spontaneously boiling; the son was to kindle a great fire where there was no light—but only plenty of fuel. So again, Peisistratus, unlike the Sibyl, at each rejection offers Athens more. The rejected party-leader becomes Athena’s man, the man of an united Attica; and Athena’s man, whom Athena’s people expelled, rests not till he can offer, of his own, every corner stone of an Athenian Empire in its greatest days. And so here, again, there is stasis between rich and poor, between primitive and advanced, between sedentary and nomad—so far as nomadism was practicable in Attica; and it is the λεπτὰ τῶν προβάτων, as with Perdiccas and with David, which produce, in due time, the great man. It is a miniature, of course, this sketch of the sixth-century Attica, as befits its modest part in the scheme of the Herodotean drama; but the handling of it is none the less significant, on that account, of the way in which the idea of conflicting νὁμοι is allowed to model and interpret the materials.
I have tried, in brief space, to indicate some ways in which our knowledge of the Greek world, fragmentary as it is, enables us to recover some at least of the broad lines of method by which the early history of Man, and the causes of his variations and of his social states, were being investigated in the fifth century and before: and to interpret some of the results which were reached, in the light of the reasoning which led to them, and the principles by which they were interpreted in antiquity. We have seen that in some points Greek anthropology had gone surprisingly far, in speculation, and in acute observation too; and we have seen it baffled, in other directions, by puzzles and mistakes which seem trivial to us. And we have seen, in the particular instance of one who was at the same time a great historian and an alert observer of anthropological fact, something of the way in which pre-Socratic stages of theory worked out when they were applied to research in the hands of an ordinary man. Above all, I have ventured to suggest—what I hope it may be for others to carry forward—an inquiry into the anthropological basis of the political doctrine of Socrates; and so to link him, on this side of his thought, with that great body of naturalist work, which I would gladly believe that he came not to destroy but to fulfil.
LECTURE VI
LUSTRATIO
The practice which is the subject of this lecture was a comparatively late growth in the religious history of ancient Italy. We commonly and vaguely translate lustratio by ‘purification’, lustrare by ‘purify’; but in Latin literature there is another sense of the word, which shows well how one particular kind of purification had become associated with it—I mean the sense of a slow ordered movement in procession. This stately processional movement, so characteristic of the old Roman character, so characteristic still of the grandeur and discipline of the Roman Church in Italy, impressed itself for ever on the Latin language in the word lustrare. Let me quote a single beautiful example of it. When Aeneas first sees and addresses Dido he says:
In freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbrae Lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet, Semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt, Quae me cumque vocant terrae.[115]
‘So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows on the hills.’ Long ago, when fishing in Wales, I watched this procession of the shadows, and ever since then it has been associated in my mind with the many ancient Italian processions which I have had to study. Such is the magical power of a great poet of nature.