Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/491

 A Note on Greek Anthropology. 427

theory is hardly so apparent. Prof. Myres has accidentally omitted some very important words : the original is ave(j)aLveTO tu re aWa ^wa iroWa Km 01 avOpcoTroi, " there came to light the rest of the animals amt men also." This omission, I think, makes considerable difference in the argument ; there is no distinction between early infusorian forms and the higher vertebrates evolved from lower organ- ism. Archelaus holds that animals and men appeared on the scene together ; at their first appearance they were autochthonous and short-lived ; they were succeeded by other animals and men, and then interbred and attained greater longevity.'* In fine, Archelaus offers no trace of any evolu- tion of man from non-human or semi-human progenitors.

The age of Anaxagoras and Archelaus was also the age of the Sophists, — a time in which the claims of Nature to override Law or Convention were widely debated, and the cry " Return to Nature " was first raised. The analogy of the lower animals was frequently adduced in discussions on human life or morality. Even Plato, the bitter opponent of Sophistic and Cynic views, thinks that women should share in the duties of the masculine " guardian," on the ground that a difference of sex causes no distinction of duties in the case of watch-dogs.^ But in none of the literature of this period is there, I believe, the slightest reference to a primitive quadrupedal man. By this time the two possible views as to the original state of man were sharply defined, — (i) that he had declined from a Golden Age,^ and (2) that he had risen from a savage condition by his own efforts. The antithesis, in one sense, is radical,

^ By interbreeding (e^ dXX^Xwi/ Y^veirts avv^a-ri]) Archelaus does not imply that men were produced by evolutionary interbreeding, as might possibly be thought ; he means that in the first stage animals and men were spontaneously generated, but in the second they produced offspring (cf. the Empedoclean idea).

^Republic, 451 D; cf. also Laws, 814 B, 836 c, 840 E. Later, the Epi- cureans laid special stress on analogies from animals (Cicero, Fin. ii,, 10, 33).

^ For the Golden Age, see K. F. Smith in Hastings' Encycl. Religion and Ethics, s.v. Ages of the World, where full authorities and references are given.