For my last illustration of how enthusiasm affects our leading classical authorities (and, therefore, leads to perversion of the truth) I take Mr. A. E. Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth. This, like Mr. Livingstone’s work, is a very excellent book, which should be in all libraries.
Mr. Zimmern quotes and definitely endorses the well-known statement in Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869), which is as follows:—“The average ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own, that is, about as much as our race is above that of the African Negro.” (The italics are mine.) Here I have happened by chance[70] upon an excellent illustration of classical enthusiasm, which is worth while dwelling upon at some length. In the first place Galton’s statement is perhaps the most absurd utterance ever made by an important thinker; in the second place it appears to have been accepted by English and European authorities for nearly half a century.
Galton bases his argument on the number of great men produced by a nation in proportion to its population. He states that between 530 and 430 B.C. the Athenian Greeks produced fourteen highly illustrious men:—Themistocles, Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, and Pericles (statesmen and commanders), Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato (literary and scientific men), Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (poets), and Pheidias (sculptor). I take the minor objections to his statement first.
He estimates the population of free-born Greeks in Attica at 90,000. In this instance he was misled by the authorities of his time and is not to blame; but I take Mr. Zimmern’s own figures, as he endorses Galton’s statement. The 90,000 should have been, according to Mr. Zimmern’s more correct figures, 180,000 to 200,000. This alone cuts down Galton’s estimate of the “average ability” of the Greeks to at least one-half. Galton also excludes the resident aliens who, according to him, numbered 40,000, but according to Mr. Zimmern 96,000. Yet both these and the outside aliens must be considered, for there were intermarriages. Themistocles and Cimon had alien mothers, Thucydides also probably had an alien mother, or at any rate was partly of Thracian descent, and there would be some ground for the charge of usurping citizenship repeatedly made by Cleon against Aristophanes. Galton also takes no account of the slaves, the number of whom he estimates at 400,000, but Zimmern at about 112,000. These cannot be entirely omitted when we consider the life of the Greek women and the habits of the men. It should be remembered that the slaves were often Greeks of other States and also by reason of the practice of exposing children some would be Athenians and even of the best families (Plato’s Laws, 930, deals with children of slaves and Greek men and women). However, on these figures, it will be seen that Galton’s estimate has to be enormously reduced.
Next, the greatest of all the names in his list, Plato, has to be struck out. There can be no reasonable doubt that he was not born until 428 or 427 B.C. (This appears to have been well recognised in 1869 and it is unaccountable that Galton and his reviewers should not have known it.) However, there is some evidence that he was born in 430, and let us assume that this is so. But, if we are to include in the 100 (or rather 101) years everyone who is born or died in that time, we are actually taking a period of 200, not 100, years, and doubling the proper estimate! Besides Plato, I may mention that Aristophanes and Xenophon could have been only about fourteen years of age in 430, Thucydides had not then begun to write, and of the eighteen plays extant of Euripides two only were written before 430. Here again is another enormous reduction of Galton’s estimate.
Again let us take Galton’s opinion of the ability of these fourteen men. It is amazingly high. It will be seen that there are only two grades between ourselves and the African negro. Again, in Galton’s table, “eminent men” are two grades above “the mass of men who obtain the ordinary prizes of life.” He now places the whole of these fourteen Greeks two grades above the eminent men! To what starry height he means to raise them, it is impossible to say, for the whole statement is exceedingly vague; but he tells us that two of the fourteen, Socrates and Pheidias, stand alone as the greatest men that ever lived.
It is clear then that the fourteen Greeks have to be placed at a tremendous height in our estimation. It is impossible here to take each man and discuss his ability, but let us inquire what qualifications Galton had as a critic. We turn to his list of great modern English and European literary men. Although he goes back as far as the Fifteenth Century and his list comprises only fifty-two writers, he finds room among them for such names as John Aikin and Maria Edgeworth! Again his ten great English poets are Milton, Byron, Chaucer, Milman, Cowper, Dibdin(!), Dryden, Hook, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. (Some names would no doubt be omitted because they did not throw light on questions of heredity, but these lists in any case are highly absurd.)
We need not greatly prolong this part of the discussion. We might ask, however, what ground had Galton, for example, to place such men as Miltiades, Aristides, or Cimon even on an equality with, say, Cæsar, Alexander, or Marlborough. How can he class Xenophon as even equal to our great writers? It is the interesting facts he tells us of, not his literary ability, that makes this somewhat monotonous writer so very interesting. (The important point to remember is that Greek literature has a very special interest and value for us, quite apart from its great intrinsic literary value. Taking De Quincey’s classification, [see p. 227], it is both “literature of power” and “literature of knowledge.”)
Now take another point which I might illustrate from Galton’s own pages. He tells us (in another connection) that about sixty years before the time he is writing (1869) there were Senior Wranglers in Cambridge who also obtained first classes in the Classical Tripos—and even at a later date men could take high rank in both departments. Is it then to be argued that the earlier men were the greater? Not so, but, as Galton says, knowledge had become so far advanced that it was no longer possible for a man to gain such a distinction in more than one of the two subjects. Here we have the point—the world of knowledge and activity is infinitely wider to-day than when it formed the subject of Greek speculation. Their great men were very original thinkers—but in a very few subjects. Moreover, they had no books to read, no foreign languages to learn. Even their social and political life was far less complicated and involved than our own.