

E-text prepared by deaurider, Paul Marshall, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made
available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustrations.
      See 53646-h.htm or 53646-h.zip:
      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/53646/53646-h/53646-h.htm)
      or
      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/53646/53646-h.zip)


      Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      https://archive.org/details/AnthropologyAndTheClassics


Transcriber's note:

      Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

      Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=).

      A carat character is used to denote superscription. A
      single character following the carat is superscripted
      (example: ^2).

      Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPITALS.





ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CLASSICS

Six Lectures Delivered Before
the University of Oxford

by

ARTHUR J. EVANS
ANDREW LANG    GILBERT MURRAY
F. B. JEVONS    J. L. MYRES W.    WARDE FOWLER

Edited by

R. R. MARETT

Secretary to the Committee for Anthropology







Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
MCMVIII

Henry Frowde, M.A.
Publisher to the University of Oxford
London, Edinburgh, New York
Toronto and Melbourne




PREFACE


Anthropology and the Humanities--on verbal grounds one might suppose
them coextensive; yet in practice they divide the domain of human
culture between them. The types of human culture are, in fact,
reducible to two, a simpler and a more complex, or, as we are wont to
say (valuing our own achievements, I doubt not, rightly), a lower and a
higher. By established convention Anthropology occupies itself solely
with culture of the simpler or lower kind. The Humanities, on the other
hand--those humanizing studies that, for us at all events, have their
parent source in the literatures of Greece and Rome--concentrate on
whatever is most constitutive and characteristic of the higher life of
society.

What, then, of phenomena of transition? Are they to be suffered to
form a no-man’s-land, a buffer-tract left purposely undeveloped,
lest, forsooth, the associates of barbarism should fall foul of the
friends of civilization? Plainly, in the cause of science, a pacific
penetration must be tolerated, nay, encouraged, from both sides at
once. Anthropology must cast forwards, the Humanities cast back. And
there is not the slightest reason (unless prejudice be accounted
reason) why conflict should arise between the interests thus led to
intermingle.

Indeed, how can there be conflict, when, as in the case of each
contributor to the present volume, the two interests in question,
Anthropology on this side and Classical Archaeology and Scholarship
on that, are the joint concern of one and the same man? Dr. Evans
both is a leading authority on prehistoric Europe, and likewise, by
restoring the Minoan age to the light of day, has set Greek history
in a new and juster perspective. Dr. Lang is an anthropologist of
renown, and no one, even amongst his peers, has enriched the science
with so many original and fertile hypotheses; nevertheless he has found
time (and for how much else has he found time as well!) not only to
translate Homer, but also to vindicate his very existence. Professor
Murray can turn his rare faculty of sympathetic insight now to the
reinterpretation of the music of Euripides, and now to the analysis of
the elemental forces that combine and crystallize in the Greek epic.
Principal Jevons is famous for his brilliant suggestions in regard
to the early history of religion; but he has also laboured in the
cause of European archaeology, and his edition of Plutarch’s _Romane
Questions_ is very precious to the student of classical antiquities.
Professor Myres, whilst he teaches Greek language and literature as the
modern man would have them taught, and is a learned archaeologist to
boot, yet can have no greater title to our respect than that, of many
devoted helpers, he did the most to organize an effective school of
Anthropology in the University of Oxford. Finally, Mr. Warde Fowler,
living embodiment as he is in the eyes of all his friends of the
Humaner Letters, both is the historian of the Graeco-Roman city-state,
and can wield the comparative method so as to extort human meaning from
ancient Rome’s stately, but somewhat soulless, rites. Unless, then,
dual personality of some dissociated and morbid type is to be
attributed to these distinguished men, they can scarcely fail, being
anthropologists and humanists at once, to carry on nicely concerted
operations from both sides of their subject, just as the clever
engineer can set to work on his tunnel from both sides of the mountain.

It is but fair to add, however, that in the present case the first move
has been made from the anthropological side. The six lectures composing
this volume were delivered during the Michaelmas Term of 1908, at the
instance of the Committee for Anthropology, which from the outset of
its career has kept steadily in view the need of inducing classical
scholars to study the lower culture as it bears upon the higher.
Anthropology, to be sure, must often divert its attention to lines of
development branching off in many a direction from the track of advance
that leads past Athens and Rome. For us, however, and consequently
for our science, the latter remains the central and decisive path of
social evolution. In short, the general orientation of Anthropology, it
would seem, must always be towards the dawn of what Lecky so happily
describes as ‘the European epoch of the human mind’.

Lastly, a word may be said in explanation of the title chosen.
‘Anthropology and the Classics’ is exactly suited to express that
conjunction of interests of which mention has already been made--the
conjunction so perfectly exemplified by the life-work of each
contributor to the volume. But some myopic critic might contend that,
however well fitted to indicate the scope of the work as a whole, the
title hardly applies to this or that essay taken by itself. It surely
matters little if this be so; yet is it so? Dr. Evans’s lecture is
introductory. To gather impetus for our imaginative leap into the
classical period we start, it is true, from the cave-man, but have
already crossed the threshold in arriving at the Cretan. Homer, Hesiod,
Herodotus--the claims of these to rank as classics are not likely to
be assailed. There remain the Roman subjects, magic and lustration. In
what sense are they classical? Now, to use the language of biology,
whereas Greek literature is congenital, Roman literature is in large
part acquired. Therefore it includes no ‘songs before sunrise’; for
it the ‘father of history’ cannot be born again. Spirit no less than
form is an importation. In particular, the magico-religious beliefs
of Latium have lost their hold on the imitator of Greece and the
Orient. Yet primal nature will out; and the Romans, moreover, were a
pious people who loved to dwell on their _origines_. To appreciate the
greatest of Latin classics, Virgil--to glance no further afield--one
must at least have gained the right to greet him as fellow-antiquary.
For the rest, these essays profess to be no more than _vindemiatio
prima_, a first gleaning. When the harvest has been fully gathered in,
it will then be time to say, in regard to the classics both of Greece
and of Rome, how far the old lives on in the new, how far what the
student in his haste is apt to label ‘survival’ stands for a force
still tugging at the heart-strings of even the most sophisticated and
lordly heir of the ages.

                                                R. R. MARETT.




                  CONTENTS


                LECTURE I                           PAGE
  THE EUROPEAN DIFFUSION OF PRIMITIVE PICTOGRAPHY
      AND ITS BEARINGS ON THE ORIGIN OF SCRIPT.
      BY A. J. EVANS                                  9

                LECTURE II
  HOMER AND ANTHROPOLOGY. BY A. LANG                 44


                LECTURE III
  THE EARLY GREEK EPIC. BY G. G. A. MURRAY           66


                LECTURE IV
  GRAECO-ITALIAN MAGIC. BY F. B. JEVONS              93


                LECTURE V
  HERODOTUS AND ANTHROPOLOGY. BY J. L. MYRES        121


                LECTURE VI
  LUSTRATIO. BY W. W. FOWLER                        169




LECTURE I

THE EUROPEAN DIFFUSION OF PICTOGRAPHY
AND ITS BEARINGS ON THE ORIGIN OF SCRIPT


The idea, formerly prevalent among classical scholars, that, before
the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, there was no developed
system of written communication in Ancient Greece, has now fairly
broken down. In itself such an assumption shows not only a curious lack
of imagination, but a deliberate shutting of the eyes on the evidence
supplied by primitive races all over the world.

Was it possible, in view of these analogies, to believe that a form of
early culture which reached the stage revealed to us by Schliemann’s
discoveries at Mycenae was, from the point of view of written
communication, below that of the Red Indians? To myself, at least, it
was clear that the apparent lacuna in our knowledge must eventually
be supplied. It was with this instinctive assurance that I approached
the field of Cretan investigation, and the results of the discoveries
in the source and seminary of the Mycenaean culture of Greece have now
placed the matter beyond the range of controversy. The clay archives
found in the Palace of Knossos and elsewhere have proved that the
prehistoric Cretan had already, a thousand years before the appearance
of the first written record of Classical Greece, passed through every
stage in the evolution of a highly developed system of script.

There is evidence of a simple pictographic stage, and a
conventionalized hieroglyphic system growing out of it. And there is
evidence in them of the evolution out of these earlier elements of a
singularly advanced type of linear script of which two inter-related
forms are known.

A detailed account of these fully equipped forms of writing that thus
arose in the Minoan world will be given elsewhere.[1] For the moment I
would rather have you regard these first-fruits of literary produce in
European soil in their relation to the tree of very ancient growth and
of spreading roots and branches that thus, in the fullness of time, put
them forth. I refer to the primitive picture- and sign-writing that was
diffused throughout the European area and the bordering Mediterranean
region from immemorial antiquity.

In attempting a general survey of the various provinces--if we may
use the word--in which the remains of this ancient pictography are
distributed, it is necessary in the first instance to direct attention
to one so remote in time and circumstances that it may almost be
legitimately regarded as belonging to an older world.

I refer to the remarkable evidence of the employment of pictographic
figures and signs, and even of some so worn by use that they can
only be described as ‘alphabetiform’, among the wall-paintings and
engravings of the ‘Reindeer Period’--to use the term in its widest
general signification.

The whole cycle of designs by the cave-dwellers of the late
Palaeolithic periods may, to a very large extent, be described as
‘picture-writing’ in the more general sense of the word. The drawings
and carvings of reindeer and bisons, or more dangerous animals, such as
the mammoth, the cave bear, and lion, doubtless commemorated personal
experiences. In one case, at any rate, the naked man stalking an
aurochs, engraved on a reindeer horn, we have an actual record of the
chase.

[Illustration: FIG. 1. Stalking Aurochs.]

But over and above this more elaborate kind of picture story, the mass
of new materials--due in a principal degree to the patient researches
of Messieurs Cartailhac, Capitan, the Abbé Breuil, and the late M.
Piette--have thrown quite a new light on the development of pictography
among the late Palaeolithic peoples. Such a series of polychrome
wall-paintings as have been discovered in the great Cave of Altamira
near Santander, in Spain--paralleled by those found in the Grotte
de Marsoulas and elsewhere on the French side of the Pyrenees, with
their brilliant colouring and chiaroscuro, present this primaeval art
under quite new aspects. Moreover the superposition of one painting or
engraving over another on the walls of the caverns has supplied fresh
and valuable evidence as to the succession of the various phases
of this ‘parietal’ art. We have to deal with almost inexhaustible
palimpsests.

What is of special interest, however, in the present connexion, is
that, side by side with the larger or more complete representations,
there appear, in the lowest layer of these rock palimpsests,
abbreviated figures and linear signs which already at times present a
truly alphabetiform character.

Here we have the evidence of a gradual advance from simpler to more
elaborate forms. On the other hand, the _converse process_, the
gradual degeneration of more pictorial forms into their shorthand,
linearized equivalents, can often be traced in the series of these
representations. The Abbé Breuil, for instance, has recently published
a series of tables showing the progressive degeneration and stylization
of the heads of horses, goats, deer and oxen.[2] Without subscribing
to his views in all their details, it is evident that this derivative
series, as a whole, can be clearly made out. The abbreviation of the
oxheads in Fig. 2 is fairly clear up to No. 12, though whether the
further procession is to be traced in the spiraliform signs that follow
may be more open to doubt. It is worth noting that a curious parallel
to these very ancient examples of the degeneration of the ox’s head
is to be found among the Cretan and Cypriote signs of the Minoan and
Mycenaean Age.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

But the course followed by evolution of figured representations during
the ‘Reindeer Period’ leads to another result, which also has parallels
in the history of later art, but which does not seem to be so generally
recognized. The degeneration, illustrated by Fig. 2, of more or less
complete figures into mere linear reminiscences, is very familiar
to us. It is well illustrated, for instance, in the relation of the
demotic and hieratic Egyptian signs to the hieroglyphic. But what is
sometimes forgotten is that the simple linear forms are sometimes the
older, and that, even as, I think, can be shown in the case of some of
the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the linearization of the pictorial form was
merely a going back to what had really been the original form of the
figure. I have also been struck with the same phenomenon in tracing
the genesis of some of the hieroglyphic characters of Minoan Crete. We
have only to look at the rude attempts of children to depict objects to
see that simple linear forms of what may perhaps be called the ‘slate
pencil’ style precedes the more elaborate stage of drawing. Art begins
with skeletons, and it is only a gradual proficiency that clothes them
with flesh and blood.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.]

So it seems to have been with the Reindeer men. It has already been
noticed that the stratigraphy of the paintings and engravings on the
Cairoan walls, as investigated by the Abbé Breuil, shows that those of
the earliest phase were line sketches of the simplest kind.[3] They
are just such as a child might draw. They seem often to have been left
incomplete from mere laziness, just so much of the figure being given
as to enable its identification. No. 9, for