Chapter XIV: The Growth of Humanity (2)

We come now, from this rather general survey of human faculty, to the more pertinent question, what sort of unity do we find in human achievement within that region, or rather within those regions, of the Old World where the stream-heads of our modern culture seem to take their rise? The qualification which has slipped from my pen is half the answer already, for we are to deal not with one homogeneous region but with a cluster of regions in all climates from Arctic tundra to Sahara and the Nile, and in all altitudes from alpine to maritime. Unity of prehistoric culture, in such conditions, can at best be but a question of degree.

Modern ethnology, emancipated from a belief in an immediate consanguinity of mankind, by the spread of less infantile views about Noah's Ark, goes on to question the sufficiency of language as a bond of union, and forthwith stumbles over the Tower of Babel.

Two contemporary lines of discovery have tended to determine the result. Geology gives us a very long margin of time since the north-west quadrant began to be reinhabited by human beings after the Ice Age, and assumed approximately its present distribution of land and water. Archaeology, which in this aspect is the special stratigraphy of man, sanctions an extension of time, since not merely human beings but organized societies of men made their appearance in Europe, which far exceeds the period required, or commonly assumed, for the spread of any known Indo-European language, from any possible 'home' to any region where it was spoken at the beginning of historic time. And not only does archaeological evidence enable us to detect such societies sedentary for a while on this or that site over the face of Europe and its neighbourhood; it traces not merely one 'prehistoric culture', but a number of distinct types of such culture, each with its own geographical distribution, and with distributions which expand and contract at different times, superseding one type of culture here, and another there, and in turn superseded by others.

It is not easy to bring home the extent of this diversity to those who are not familiar with the physical condition of a Europe which was as yet largely in the 'backwood' stage of exploitation. But it will give some idea of the range of contrast, if we revert to the method of Thucydides,[7] and compare the unexploited Europe of the days before agriculture, with unexploited America at the time of its discovery by Europeans. Here, within the same geographical limits of the north temperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief which characterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as those of the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huron and Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in the south-east, buffalo-hunting Sioux on the prairie, predatory Apaches and Blackfeet in the foothills, and littoral and riparian fisher-folk on the Pacific slope: just as recognizable now, in their distributions and overlaps, by the fashions of their pipe-bowls and other debris, as are the representatives of the 'row-grave' culture or the makers of 'band-keramik' in Central Europe.

Keeping in mind this analogy of prehistoric Europe with pre-Columbian North America, let us classify the problems of subsistence which these Old World regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting him all the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) as well, how he is to formulate solutions which shall show any trace of uniformity, and yet be solutions for him of the one Protean problem, how to sustain life here and now?

Along the Arctic seaboard, homogeneous from Behring Strait nearly to the North Cape, we have the frozen tundra region, with a characteristic tundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into a habitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of the shrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts, and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the large northward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long, or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastorals imprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes through the forests, and domesticated our best of beasts, the reindeer; stealing a march here on our Alaskan cousins, who call them caribou and treat them so: _they_ had no pastorals on the prairie southward to teach them otherwise, and when the Russians came and brought reindeer over from Asia, the silly fellows turned them loose and hunted them till they had eaten them all.

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet, interrupted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, and eat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, many of whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not the place to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forest world is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craft with it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, for sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the prairie buffalo and drive _him_ over the hunting grounds; some sport, too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and underwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, that the deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make those people show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots. Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and have to go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they like their animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are their first string, as we bow-men say.

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaks perforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character, rather than gives place to anything fresh along the shores of the Lake Region of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux in America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smaller scale the great grassland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian. Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniature grasslands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland, where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical _Hackbau_, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a poor man. For the house-slave could handle a _zappa_, the spadelike Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where food-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate.

This kind of garden-cultivation indeed repeats very closely the foodquest of the Muskogean cultivators in the South-eastern States, who make up the so-called 'civilized tribes' and, almost alone among the Redskins, 'are all self-supporting and prosperous'.[8] In the Old World, as in the New, its distribution is closely defined by certain limits of rainfall and temperature, and most of all by the extent to which the rainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warm summer is assured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he has access to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times, and still predominates, all round the mountainous shores of the Mediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, and penetrates inland and upland into the forests till summer clouds and rainfall check it. In this region of its distribution Greek and Roman legends betray the belief that grain-cultivation came late, and superseded a staple diet of tree produce, chestnut, walnut, filbert, and acorn.[9] And when the 'nobler grasses' came, it was barley and red wheat that predominated, as indeed they predominate still.

But this is only one part of the distribution of the garden-culture. Far north along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far inland as the mild Atlantic climate is perceptible, the same type prevails. Its ancient limit is traced meteorologically in Tacitus' complaints (for example) of the austerity of the lands beyond the Rhine. In this northern region grain crops pass from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and from both to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato have been acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlantic and Mediterranean sections, illustrate exactly the place which primitive hoe-culture held in the economy of the Old-World region. Early monuments of this culture, in which hoe and ox-plough are equally conspicuous, are the 'meraviglie' rock-carvings above Ventimiglia.[10] The fine flower of it is the Minoan civilization of the Crete and the South Aegean. Egyptian agriculture is also in great part hoe-work.

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in the great plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different regime; vast featureless and treeless grasslands, extending past the Black Sea and Caspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs of the Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all, he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turn sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor' of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies another group of grasslands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable of sustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round their margins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations now and then.

From the human point of view, the profound difference between the northern and the southern group of these grasslands, which collectively lie athwart the great east-and-west mountain zone of the Old World, is this. The southern grassland sustains sheep and goats almost exclusively; it acquired its domesticated horses recently (at earliest about 2000 B.C.) and from the north-east; and it relies, for transport, on camels and asses, not on wheeled vehicles. The northern, on the other hand, has sufficient perennial pasture to permit of oxen; it uses horses habitually; and it has utilized the timber of its parkland margin, where it passes over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts and ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization, wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial pasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsed chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hittite chariot-users of Asia Minor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gauls in West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of the Mountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have noted already, than borderers of the Grassland itself. In particular, they are all sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratory Scythian cart-folk in the northern Grassland. The only nomad cart-folk within the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies,[11] and they seem mainly to have formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all, the vast table-land of Persia.

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at present is that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle to break up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above all more rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a man can barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, except in irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more, and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of the large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone, or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and even Egypt, had large cattle from very early times. North Syria seems to dispute with Babylonia priority in the production of wheat. Somewhere in this region we may provisionally place the cradle of what I may perhaps describe as the Bread-and-Cheese culture, in which the staple foods are provided by grain-plants and cattle, the latter being valued for their strength and their milk products, but not primarily for their flesh.

Disseminated westward, the Bread-and-Cheese culture is found to suffer regional modification. Southward, among the Mediterranean evergreen flora and old hoe-cultivation, the dearth of summer grass makes the large cattle useless for milking, as well as for beef; they are bred exclusively for draught, as their gait and structure show, and while cheese is supplied by the sheep and goats, butter and animal-fats are replaced by the vegetable oils, of which the olive is the chief, a characteristic Mediterranean product, evergreen, deep-rooted against summer drought, and fleshy-fruited. A Bread-and-Olive culture results, familiar to all visitors to Mediterranean lands. In the deciduous forests of South-Central Europe there is grass in the clearings, and milk enough; but goats and sheep are restricted, as the undergrowth becomes deeper and denser, and the prime giver of fats is the forest-bred pig: in a land rolling with ham and sausages we reach the Bread-and-Bacon culture. Further afield still, and later, in proportion as the forest is opened out by semi-pastoral folk, the moister summer permits open meadow-land, with perennial grass, and the possibility of hay. Here too the grain crops may be so large that there is something over to fatten stock; and to Bread and Cheese the farmer of the north-western plains adds Beef. When there is coarse grain in plenty, of course, the large-boned horse of the north gradually replaces the ox at the plough, and permits him to be bred, as with ourselves, not for draught at all, but for milking and killing exclusively. It is in this final phase that the Bread-and-Beef culture passes over eventually into the New World, and into the South Temperate Zone. It has been rather a long story to tell, and full of platitudes, but the gist of it is by this time clear. Whatever be the superstructure of social institutions, of arts and sciences, of religion and philosophy, that European men have built upon it, the regime which has made the Western World what it is, from before the dawn of metallurgy until now, has been generically a Bread culture; based on that combination of pastoral and agricultural life in which large cattle co-operate with man in the laborious preparation of the soil which cereal crops require. But the Bread culture itself is always supplemented by some form of milk product, of which cheese is typical. It is almost always supplemented further by some special provision of fats; in Mediterranean conditions by olives and oil, involving extensive tree culture; in the forest region by pig's meat; and on the Atlantic seaboard by butter and beef.

The exhilarants show the same geographic control; with the olive culture go the wines and brandies of the south; with the forest culture, the ciders and the cherry brandies of Central Europe; with the copious cereals and meadow-grass, the beers and whiskies of the North. In details, of course, the distribution of types is intricately confused; but the main outline is clear; and we reach a first glimpse of a coherent European culture, on the almost animal plane of regional foodquests.

RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY

Precedence has been given in our inquiry to the mere animal struggle of man with nature for bare subsistence, for two distinct reasons. The first is economic, namely, that just because this struggle is without qualification that of a highly intelligent animal species to maintain itself under these or those conditions, it is one which befalls equally every breed or race of that species which is ever exposed to those conditions; and further, is no more mitigated by considerations of language than by considerations of race. The second reason is historical or archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far back in the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that it preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles, before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still more before the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed, it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which has changed its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types of culture appropriate to the regions into which it has penetrated, than to associate the spread of any element of culture so fundamental as the food-quest with the migrations of any racial type.

Race, indeed, in Europe, as well as further afield, has been anything but a factor of unity. When we speak (on platforms) of Europeans as 'white men', we are in danger of forgetting, what every practical man in our audience knows, that we are dealing with at least three distinct breeds of mankind, which agree, indeed, rather imperfectly in the whiteness of their skin, but differ greatly in other points of structure and physique, including resistance to certain types of climate and regional diseases, and not least in temperament and the quality of their response to Nature's challenges of hardship or indulgence. Of these three breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'white men' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes) is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the 'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnological propaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution; either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult to see why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of the cultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasian grassland, in which case he is as much an intruder into peninsular Europe as his brachycephalic 'Alpine' rival, and his claim to represent indigenous European man must go. The large part which he has played in European history seems to result partly from his great physical strength, surpassed (I believe) only by that of the Negro, partly from his reluctance, not so much to interbreed with more pigmented strains, but to admit the crossbred offspring to full partnership with himself. Even among his like, he has his own criteria by which one 'white man' knows another, and coheres with him politically.

Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is the slight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, that he is closely related with the men of the African and Arabian grasslands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers of the Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and at last has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast between Crete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, in fact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinity between South-west Europe and North-west Africa.

But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically at the Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula, and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentially continuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of the Mountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less than in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their predecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It is difficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence or political enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads of prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their English namesakes in the seventeenth century.

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe' amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language; while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate, Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe has brought not peace, but a sword.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If northern genealogies are any guide,--and they are not likely to have reduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its full extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War. In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great Gods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of Europe to unite it.

And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove far too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (_Germania_, chap. 9) are common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who are either not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined within walls', but haunt 'forests and groves'.

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion, which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and aesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something like first-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, not Caesar's impression of a Celtic god, or Herodotus' transcript of a Scythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, and though, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts, stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic, not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten us more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They are terribly provincial and tell their tale with a twang. We can trace our _Bandkeramik_ and _Schnurkeramik_ and _Urfirnissmalerei_ and all that sort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the _centum_ and _satem_ languages. But even if we could collate the 'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvoelker' as recent enthusiasts propose, we should be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to a common language.

Metal, and even stone, implements do not help us much further, though they were traded more widely than pottery, and form larger provinces. In modern Europe, in the same way, pocket-knives are rather more uniform than milk-jugs; and where they differ, are referable to fewer types. But there is no unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anything more, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such as the introduction of bronze, of iron, of glass and glazed earthenware; and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole, but as processes within it, affecting now one region, now another, in a sequence which is clearly geographical and at very variable speed. Bronze, for example, took some thousands of years to permeate the continent of Europe; iron perhaps as many hundreds; platinum a little more than fifty years; and radium less than five.

What we do get from this material evidence, however, is a quite indisputable sequence of styles in time in each locality where we can hit upon stratified remains. Dead men, they say, tell no tales; potsherds are as truthful and eloquent as they are, for the very reason that, once broken, they are dead and done with, and are allowed to lie quiet in their rubbish heaps. Intervals indeed we cannot so easily measure; but of sequences we can be sure, and by comparing the sequences on different sites we can go far towards tracing the spread and supersession of a style, sometimes over wide areas, and occasionally, with the help of the geography, we can be pretty sure of the routes by which innovations travelled. We can infer nothing, however, from this as to the movements of people: the vogue of the willow-pattern plate is no measure of our 'yellow-peril'. But where works of art can travel, ideas can travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race and language and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, the customary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. A few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of decadence.

It is not a merely ephemeral interest which draws attention at this point to the significance of engines of war, among this class of transferable inventions. Little has been done in a systematic way on this topic, but the rapidity with which a really important change in equipment and organization passes from camp to camp, and revolutionizes not only armies but states, when it is a question of survival or defeat, has its illustration in many phases of warfare, and ranks among the great levellers of national or regional pride.

The recorded movements of peoples in historic times, and the previous movements inferred from language, and other symptoms, indicate a long-established distribution of what might be described in meteorological phrase as _man-pressure_; certain regions being characterized either always or repeatedly by high man-pressure, and an outward flow of men into the cyclonic areas or vortexes of low man-pressure in the human covering (or biosphere) of the planet. Typical high-pressure regions are the Arabian peninsula with its repeated crises of Semitic eruption, and the great Eurasian grasslands. Typical regions of low man-pressure, and repeated irruption, are the South European peninsulas. Occasionally a region plays both parts, alternately accepting inhabitants, and unloading them on to other lands; examples are the Hungarian plain, Scandinavia, and Britain. Others again can hardly be said to have a population of their own at all, but are simple avenues of transmission, like Western Switzerland and the Hellespont Region. I am speaking now, of course, about ancient times. The causes of these recurrent movements are not clearly made out; but the movements themselves, and the fact that they are of regional recurrence, are matters of history.

Conspicuous among such movements are the westward drift from Asia into peninsular Europe, in its three parallel columns, through tundra, forest, and steppe; and the southward drifts, subsidiary to this, from East Central Europe into the Balkan lands and round the head of the Adriatic. The course of these drifts is laid out in detail, as we have seen, by the physique of the regions; and therewith is determined the kind of life which each set of folk must be living if it is to survive the journey.

And here we come at once upon a new factor making strongly for a more general uniformity of culture within peninsular Europe than its physical character would at all prepare us to expect. For although individual men often respond very rapidly to fresh surroundings, and can change their mode of life almost as they change their clothes, societies react far more slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinate members. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for a change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyond Jordan, and to canonize a new code of behaviour suited to a new set of needs. This social inertia, of which political history is the sorry record, is of course least perceptible, and most effective, when the region of transition is graduated gently; and we have already seen that this is conspicuously so around the parkland margin of the northern grassland, where it faces on peninsular Europe. Let us follow this clue in detail.

We may safely assume, as we have seen, that for a long while past, every group of newcomers into peninsular Europe has come equipped with the particular type of social organization which enabled it to make good, either on the tundra, or in the northern woodland, or on the steppe, or (if it came across the Bosphorus) on the enclosed plateaux of Asia Minor and beyond. The tundra does not greatly concern us, for the White Sea cuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps from the Samoyeds and their kin. Classical descriptions of the inhabitants of the North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late as the first century B.C., was at its best a broken prolongation of the pastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less fortunate tribes either had never had cattle, like the hunting Redskins of the corresponding forest zone of North America, or had lost them since they entered the forest, and maintained themselves by hunting and robbery like the broken pastorals who infest the east edge of the Congo basin; the Chatti of Tacitus' day enjoying tyrannous hegemony not unlike that of the Five Nations.

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoral condition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity of European civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its social organization in patriarchal households linked into clans and tribes. We may doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forest regime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outside peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it is characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its liability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or later into a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrent drift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes. Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the same function, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours from Babylonia to Palestine and Egypt.

On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recurs intermittently in our 'western' world culminates in those phases of its history when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues of intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in the _Femmes savantes_ of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France, which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the _fin-de-siecle_ Europe of yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater.

No one would suggest that this patriarchal and tribal structure favoured political unity or large enterprises of any kind. In fact, throughout the early history of Europe these coherent kinship groups, with their inner insulation and their inability to offer anything but passive resistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were an insuperable bar to anything politically larger. 'If only these could hold together, they would rule the world' is the judgement of Herodotus on Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul, of Tacitus on Germany: each with the unspoken afterthought 'but thank goodness that they cannot!'

But while it hindered larger growths of political structure, so long as it remained intact, and furnished a strong social skeleton upon which to frame manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements, patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the federalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle the village-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or direct offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the city-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary, at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural outgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man who first introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatest advantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them to one another', so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans became friends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in one and the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations and political chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age in Greek lands. Rome's mission among the tribal societies of Italy is essentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary of political enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in its imperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which were essentially the same, so slow to be solved.

We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of a peninsular Europe--for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinct geographic entity--in which the diverse races, and languages, and religious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagated under the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous, indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involved annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but sufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they were based on the same large needs, not merely of 'living' somehow but of 'living well', and to respect this common heritage of intertribal customs, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted aliens they were wont to 'make war like gentlemen'. To Homer's audience it was sure proof that Odysseus was really 'at the back of nowhere', when the Cyclops was unable to behave when a stranger came to his cave: he was 'a monster, of knowledge not according to the rules'.[12] It was a criticism of despair, like that of M. Levy-Bruhl: for the Cyclops had the 'will to power'.[13]

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an _oikoumene_ where _men_ could _live_, tolerant of fairly wide variations in detail, within a general uniformity: for tribal society in Middle Italy or even in Western Greece, as we first catch sight of it, was by no means homogeneous with tribal society beyond the Alps in the times of Caesar and Tacitus. But apart from these variations, tribal Europe was a coherent whole; and it was so because, and as long as, no new problems of adjustment between Man and Nature arose to upset the balance struck by that Bread-culture with which we were concerned just now. For the patriarchal tribal societies, as we watch them still in Albania for example, are neither more nor less than the political aspect of that culture, and their varieties and deviations stand in close correlation with the varieties which we have seen the Bread-culture assume.

In the same way, the break-down of this social structure proceeds, step by step, in relation with the two great changes to which normal Bread-culture is exposed. On the one hand, primitive self-sufficiency (the retrospective ideal of Greek political thought) was infringed irrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancient Scythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, 'there are no earthquakes and they grow wheat to sell'; for in the Mountain Zone you are never secure against shocks, and almost never have any surplus of grain. Once in oversea contact with lands like these, it became more economical to buy grain thence, and to pay for it by increasing the production of oil and wine, than to grow everything at home; and a new and 'limitless' source of wealth emerged in the process of exchange.

On the other hand, oil and wine needing far less labour than grain-crops and offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to start doing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth, and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly) introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less 'limitless' and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of any kind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial wealth, like its commercial counterpart, was personal wealth, owed wholly to skill and push, and in no way due to your clansmen or your clan. When the poet cursed the discovery of metals, he put his finger on the 'key-industry' of the whole industrial development; and when he cursed the invention of shipping, he struck at the root-trouble of all, which had revealed to autonomous Bread-cultured tribes in peninsular Europe lands otherwise constituted and endowed by Nature, the exploitation of which seemed in the beginning so easy and obvious, but is, in fact, so profound a revolution for the societies whose members have attempted it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was for him the shipbuilding pine.[14]

But the dissolution of early European society and culture under the stress of contact with regions outside Europe is no matter of prehistoric times. The task of this essay is over when it has presented that society and culture as Man's reasoned attempt to 'live well' in an exclusively European world.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Marett, _Anthropology_. Home University Library.

J.L. Myres, _The Dawn of History_. Home University Library.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This chapter has not had the advantage of Prof. Myres's revision, in view of the rest of the book which he has not seen. Being for some time abroad on war-work, it was impossible to communicate with him; and it is therefore thought best to print his paper just as it was written some months before the lectures were delivered.]

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, viii. 144. After the battle of Salamis, when the Athenians are invited by Xerxes' envoy to desert the Greek cause, they say they cannot betray what 'is of one blood and of one speech, and has establishments of gods in common, and sacrifices, and habits of life of similar mode'.]

[Footnote 3: For details see the section on Herodotus in _Anthropology and the Classics_; and E.E. Sikes, _The Anthropology of the Greeks_.]

[Footnote 4: Thucydides i. 6 (Greek: polla d' an kai alla tis apodeixeie, to palaion Hellenikon omoiotropa to nun barbariko diaitomenon).]

[Footnote 5: (Greek: tou gar logon eontos xynon, zoousin oi polloi os idian echoutes phronesin).]

[Footnote 6: (Greek: anthropoisi pasi metesti ginoskein eautous kai sophroneein).]

[Footnote 7: Thucydides, i. 5. He too, as it happens, is illustrating a primitive Old World, round the Aegean shores of Greece, by the contemporary West in the backwoods of Aetolia.]

[Footnote 8: Farrand, _The Basis of American History_, 1904, p. 270.]

[Footnote 9: The [Greek: balanephagoi andres], 'acorn-eating men', of Greek traditional ethnology.]

[Footnote 10: Bicknell, _The Prehistoric Rock Engravings in the Italian Maritime Alps_, Bordighera, 1902; _Further Explorations_, 1903. I begin to suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which accompany the drawings of oxen, ploughs, and men with hoes may represent the cultivation plots.]

[Footnote 11: I owe valuable information about the Gipsies to my friend Dr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but he is in no way responsible for this interpretation of it.]

[Footnote 12: _Odyssey_ ix. 428 (Greek: pelor, athemistia eidos).]

[Footnote 13: _Odyssey_ ix. 214-15:

(Greek: andr' epeleusesthai megalen epieimenon alken,
agrion, oute dikas en eidota oute themistas.)]

[Footnote 14: Horace, _Epode_ xvi. In his 'better land'--

Non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus,
Neque impudica Colchis intulit pedem....
Iuppiter illa piae _secrevit_ litora genti,
Ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum;

AEre, dehinc ferro duravit saecula; quorum
Piis secunda, vate me, datur fuga.]

III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on the Ancient World by asserting the conviction that the only genuine and important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past really past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall. As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that imperfectly.

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is always of the present or nothing.

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or the brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the specious present'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward environment--in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are not _severed_ by the Present, but that these meet and are made one in its living and concrete actuality. This is the fact, the centre to which all radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Present the Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once.

Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit and with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aim at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what is merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor our environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are not merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but the present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'--a narrative of 'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it, spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate--which is also its present--import is an account of what we now are and the situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest sense useless to us unless in the end we can say '_De nobis fabula narratur_'--it is _our_ history to which we have been listening.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World--the world of classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors. We _are_ the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own youth.

Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to approach the study of Classical Antiquity--not merely in that of gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world. For what other knowledge matters?