Table Of ContentPRIMITIVISM AND RELATED IDEAS IN ANTIQUITY
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF PRIMITIVISM
AND
PRIMITIVISM RELATED
IDEAS IN ANTIQUITY
BY
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY
GEORGE BOAS
WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAYS
BY
W. ALBRIGHT
F.
AND
DUMONT
P. E.
O
OCTAGON BOOKS
Adivisionof Farrar,StrausandGiroux
NewYork 1973
Copyright 1935 by TheJohns Hopkins Press
Reprinted 1965
byspecialarrangement with TheJohnsHopkinsPress
SecondOctagonprinting1973
OCTAGON BOOKS
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The Editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the
American Council of Learned Societies through grants in
aid of the preparation and publication of this volume.
PREFACE
The story which the present and subsequent volumes of this series are to
tell in part is, broadly described, that of man's reflection upon the general
course of his own history and upon the value of those achievements of his
which have been most distinctive of that history. Perhaps by the early
Pleistocene time protoplasm had taken for—m in a structure unique among its
myriad combinations and metamorphoses the brain of homo sapiens; and
with the emergence of a creature endowed with this peculiar organ, a strange,
long process, unknown to all the rest of nature, began. One of the feebler
and more ungainly of the vertebrates set out, though with no prevision of
the outcome, upon the singular business of transforming his environment
and himself. Having been endowed, for better or worse, with an irrepressi-
ble propensity for taking thought, he found, through this, means which no
instinct had taught him, means ever more various and more complex, of
satisfying, first, impulses and aversions which he shared with other animals,
and then, along with these, a multiplying host of other desires, as alien to
himself at the outset as they were, and remain, to his animal kindred. The
history of this process of man's cultural development is, in its outlines and
in much of its variegated detail, now familiar. It is not with it, but with
a somewhat less familiar accompaniment of it, that the present work is
concerned. Probably among most races in which the process was not arrested
at a very early stage, certainly among most of those the history of whose
ideas is best known to us through their literatures, men long ago began an
appraisal both of the historic process in general and of the predominant
—
tendency which was manifested in it the tendency which we call the
progress of civilization. As the generations pass, does the condition of
mankind grow better, or grow worse, or remain, except in external and
relatively unimportant ways, the same; has the advance of civilization been
a gain or a loss for the species responsible for it; is it a manifestation of
man's superiority among the creatures, a legitimate ground for racial pride,
or is it an evidence of his folly or depravity; are those peoples the most
fortunate among whom it never began, or was speedily halted? It is the
record of the opinions which men, chiefly in the Occident, have held upon
such—questions, at least down to a century—and a half ago, that these volumes
are if the project can be carried out designed to present the record,
:
especially,—of civilized man's misgivings about his performances, about his
prospects and about himself. Some parts of the story, mainly in modern
times, have been well told by others in various special studies; what is here
attempted is a—somewhat fuller, more connected and more integrated pre-
sentation of it and therefore one which, so far as the literary material
available permits, begins at the beginning.
IX
X PREFACE
The history of any idea, or complex of ideas, is best presented through
the citation of the ipsissima verba of the writers who have expressed it.
No scholar is likely to be satisfied merely with a series of precis or inter-
pretations of the opinions and reasonings of those writers, unless he is
already intimately familiar with them; he will wish to have the texts under
his own eye. It is, therefore, a—n essential feature of the p—lan of the present
series that it shall be chiefly so far as is practicable a documentary
history of the ideas with which it is concerned. There are, however, unfor-
tunately or fortunately, limits to the practicability of this plan. When the
modern period is reached, the increasing multiplicity and voluminosity of
the material will make unavoidable a relatively more restricted selection
from among the whole number of relevant writings, supplemented by refer-
ences to, or bibliographies of, passages which are less important in their
historic influence, or are mere repetitions of already trite themes. This
limitation, in the case of later volumes of the series, can, however, perhaps
in sufficient degree, be offset by the publication of critical editions of the
longer texts of major importance in the history of modern primitivism and
of the idea of progress (where such editions are still lacking), and of
special monographs on particular episodes in that history.1 In the present
volume a nearer approximation to a comprehensive corpus of texts illustra-
tive of the principal ideas dealt with is possible, though even here some
resort to summarization or bare reference has been necessary, to keep the
book within a moderate length; and examples of a number of other ten-
dencies of thought having some connection with these ideas have been
omitted. It is all too likely, also, that there are other omissions due to the
limitations of the editors' knowledge.
It is hoped that this initial volume may be of some interest and use to
students of classical literature, but it is not chiefly with them in view that
it has been compiled. Most of the texts will be familiar to them, though
these texts have not hitherto, so far as the editors are aware, been brought
together and comprehensively studied in their interconnections and con-
trasts, as illustrations of ancient reflection upon a single group of related
issues. But—the principal purpose of this volume is to exhibit the classic—al
background and thereby, in many cases, the probable classical sources
of the manifold expressions of primitivism, and also of ways of thinking
opposed to it, in modern literature, earlymodern historiography, and modern
1 In the collateral series of Contributions to the History of Primitivism the follow-
ing volumes have already appeared or are shortly to appear: Lahontan's Dialogues
curieux entre Vauteur et un sauvage de ton sens qui a voyage, et Memoires de
VAmeriquc septentrionale, edited by Gilbert Chinard, 1931; The Happy Beast in
French Thought of the Seventeenth Century, by George Boas, 1933; Primitivism
and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century,
by Lois Whitney, 1934, all published by The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore. An
edition of Diderot's Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, by Gilbert Chinard,
is in preparation.
;
PREFACE xi
social philosophy and ethics. There is some reason to think that this back-
ground is not universally familiar to those whose special fields of study lie
within the period from the Renaissance to our own time; it is, in any case,
certain that without a fairly full acquaintance with it a good many passages
in modern writings, and the ideas contained in them, cannot be seen in
their true historical perspective. Even in the works of learned authors it is
sometimes still possible to find indications of the supposition that primi-
tivism was essentially a novelty in the seventeenth or the eighteenth cen-
tury; and in the minds of the less learned the belief appears still wid—ely to
prevail that it was a queer paradox introduced chiefly by Rousseau the
fact being that it was then beginning to go (temporarily) out of fashion,
and that Rousseau contributed something to bring about its obsolescence.
The texts given in the following pages will at least suffice to show that most
of the various aspects of primitivistic thought conspicuous in those cen-
turies had their counterparts in classical antiquity; and since most modern
writers before the present ce—ntury had more or less classical education, it
may frequently be presumed and is in numerous cases fairly—evident from
similarities in particular expressions or turns of thought that these
counterparts were also the originals. To our own age ancient primitivism
has a different relation. Of direct, or even indirect, influence of the classical
primitivistic tradition there is probably little. But since the beginning of
the present century, Western man has become increasingly sceptical con-
cerning the nineteenth-century "myth of progress", increasingly troubled
with misgivings about the value of the outcome of civilization thus far,
about the future to which it tends, and about himself as the author of it all
and similar doubts and apprehensions found expression two millennia and
more ago. In spite of the more complex and sophisticated general ideology
of the contemporary exponents of these moods, there are striking parallels
to be observed between certain of the texts that follow and some passages in,
e. g., suchwritings as Freud's Civilization anditsDiscontents and Spengler's
Man and Technics.
This volume, then, has been planned chiefly to be of convenient use to
those whose primary interest is in the history of ideas in modern times.
A large proportion of such users, it has been assumed, will wish to have
before them the relevant texts in their original tongues; on the other hand,
the addition of translations has seemed likely to make the compilation
serviceable to a wider public. Some explanatory matter has been added
which would, doubtless, be superfluous for specialists in the classics. Texts
have been taken from approved editions of the works cited, in the main
without alterations and without variae lectiones, though occasionally the
editors have ventured emendations of punctuation, and, in a few cases, of
readings. The translations, except a few indicated in footnotes, are new,
but as a rule the best former translations have been "diligently compared,"
and where special felicities of rendering have been found in them, they have
PREFACE
x{{
been adopted. Platonic passages have usually been given in Jowett's classic
version, with some emendations; and the rule of printing the originals
in extenso has been departed from in the chapter on Plato, in view of their
general accessibility. Non-classical readers should perhaps be warned that
a number of the historical matters touched upon are deeply involved in
controversy among specialists; there is, indeed, not a great deal in classical
literature and philosophy, from the dates and the authenticity of texts to the
interpretation of them, which is not in some degree involved in controversy.
It is, for example, not universally agreed among competent scholars that
any of the ideas in the Platonic dialogues are the ideas of Plato. About the
history of Cynicism, for another example, there has been, and still is, much
division of learned opinion, and it has, partly because of the paucity of
material from the first century of that school, been a fertile field for ingeni-
ous, and sometimes discordant, hypotheses. Into these disputes and con-
jectures the editors have for the most part avoided entering; to have done
so would have been to convert a considerable part of the volume into a series
of controversial chapters of minute analysis of texts, possibly of interest to
specialists, but not serviceable to the principal objects in view. The general
policy adopted has been to adhere to what appear to be the more commonly
accepted views of contemporary classical scholars, while indicating the more
important points about which dubiety has arisen. The main outlines of the
history to be related are not, in-most cases, greatly affected by these dis-
putes and whatever views be taken concerning them, the body of texts given
;
remains as the background of modern primitivism and anti-primitivism.
The problem of arranging the material in the manner likely to be the
most illuminating and convenient has been difficult and, since the reasons
;
for the solution adopted may not be evident, an explanation of it may be
desirable. In the historiography of ideas, it is the fortunes of distinct
' unit-ideas and their interrelations of congruity or opposition, that are
to be exhibited, not the ' systems ' of philosophers or schools, in which
heterogeneous notions and reasonings on a variety of subjects are conjoined
in a manner often determined chieflybythe peculiarities of the philosophers'
temperaments. An analysis and anatomizing of texts, and a separating-out
of the passages pertinent to the several ideas of which the history is under
investigation, are therefore the first essentials in such a study. The pas-
sages illustrative of a given unit of this kind, and of its vicissitudes, need
then to be brought together as a separate division of the story. These
methodological preconceptions have chiefly determined the arrangement of
the passages herein cited.2 They precluded a merely chronological sequence
of long passages, where these ranged over a number of ideas which it
3The general conception of the method of the history of ideas which will be fol-
lowed in this series has been more fully set forth by one of the editors in the
introductory chapter of a volume shortly to appear: The Great Chain of Being,
by A. 0. Lovejoy.
