Ancient Eugenics
(idea) 	by Lometa 	Mon Feb 19 2001 at 19:56:16

Introduction

Eugenics is the study of improving the human race by genetic means and dates from ancient times. In his Republic, Plato depicts an ideal society through the effort to improve human beings through selective breeding. English scientist Sir Francis Galton pioneered the use of statistics in genetic thought. In his first important book, Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race, but the idea never won widespread acceptance. Many people fear that a eugenics program would take away basic human rights, such as people's rights to marry whom they choose. The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by Galton and he continued to expound its benefits until his death in 1911. Since the 1950s there has been a renewed interest in eugenics because certain diseases as hemophilia and Tay-Sach's Disease are now known to be genetically transmitted. Moreover, some states in the United States have laws that are aimed at preventing persons with known defects from having children. To date expanding eugenics programs, which range from the creation of sperm banks for the genetically superior to the potential cloning of human beings, have met with extreme resistance from the public, which often views such programs as unwarranted interference with nature or as opportunities for abuse by authoritarian regimes.

Ancient Eugenics is an essay that explores eugenics from its pre-history barbarism to its roots in the classical philosophical era of Socrates and Plato was written in 1913 by Allen G. Roper (Late of Keble College, Oxford Vol. 32, Mankind Quarterly, 06-01-1992, pp 383). It received the Arnold Prize for its informative nature, pertaining to the improvement of humans in the past. The ancient Greeks and early Romans believed that all human qualities were rooted in heredity. The essay is in public domain and contains quotes from Aristotle to Xenophon on classical breeding.

Ancient Eugenics

The preface to a history of eugenics is most probably to be found in the Paleolithic, for the first eugenists (sic) was not the Spartan legislator, but the earliest hominid who killed the critically impaired child. The lower the economic level of the community, the more rapidly it reproduces itself. There is an extravagant production of raw material, and the way of Nature is the ruthless rejection of all that is superfluous. When there is no differential birth rate, nature adjusts the balance by means of a differential death rate. In the days when human or animal foe threatened on every side, when "force and fraud were the two cardinal virtues," the life of man was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Natural selection was both ruthless and severe. Eventually, some conception of the wasteful processes of Nature at some time dawned upon the increasingly intelligent human mind. While they lived their short lives, the weakly, the deformed, and the superfluous were a burden to the band. Human custom, superseding natural law, would be tempted to eliminate them at birth. This was the atavistic basis on which subsequent eugenics was built.

In Greece, however, primitive eugenic practices underwent a logical development. It was recognized that the occurrence of the non-viable child was inevitable, and remedial custom and subsequent legislation essayed by anticipation to reduce this waste of life to a minimum. It was realized that to increase the productivity of the best stock is a more important measure than to repress the productivity of the worst. Out of the negative aspect of eugenics develops the positive.

Speculation on Earliest Days

With the advance of civilization, conditions became increasingly stable: war is still imminent, but, instead of being an essential element of existence, it comes to be regarded as a necessary evil. Eugenic measures are still necessary, but in the altered conditions a new ideal is born. The conception of a race of competent warriors develops into the ideal of a state of healthy citizens. All these formulations of eugenics are aristocratic and parochial; they are to benefit the people of a single state, and only a section within that state. Any wider conception of broad eugenic regeneration was impossible to a people who dichotomized the state into free citizens and slaves who were devoid of legal status.

Thus the earliest elements of eugenics are to be found in the attempt of early men to combat the wasteful processes of nature by eliminating the non-viable at birth. Modern efforts, on the contrary, have been directed to the prolongation of the lives of the non-viable. Instead of sacrificing the unfit in the interests of the fit, we employ every resource of modern science, in the words of one early eugenicist, "to keep alight the feeble flame of life in the baseborn child of a degenerate parent."

The weapons forged by nature have been taken from her hands. Side by side with the rapid multiplication of the unfit there has been a marked decline in the birth-rate of the creative and productive elements of the community.

In the second place, the abolition of infanticide has confronted us with the necessity of knowledge. The methods of the animal breeder are ruthless and precise. He slaughters or he spares, and divergent variations are a matter of no moment. So the Spartans and Plato, with this analogy before them, were saved from the necessity of any deeper knowledge by the preventive check of infanticide. If Nature erred in her intentions, this art was at hand to rectify her mistakes. Infanticide saved the Greeks from many of the problems of defective heredity.

When concerned with the question of eugenics, there is the problem of selection. Though physique is easily estimated, and correlated, perhaps, as Galton held, with other good qualities, the modern eugenicist has before him no simple homogeneous ideal. He has to recognize the psychical as well as the physical aspect of the intricate mosaic of human personality. The altruistic claim their place no less than those of brilliant intellect such as a Marcus Aurelius or an Adam Bede. Even though we hold it possible to compile a list of qualities for selection universally acceptable, we cannot, under the present limitations of our knowledge, prove personal value to be synonymous with reproductive value. No schema of economic eugenics, inferring the aptitudes of individuals from social position or income, can solve the hopeless perplexities that wait upon constructive methods. Passing from the individual ethnic group to the panorama of diverse world populations, eugenic theory is confronted by the conflicting ideals not only of alternative characters, but also of incompatible cultural values, themselves often reflecting differences in heritable personality. Since differentiation is an indispensable factor in human progress, there thus arises the further problem of a eugenic ethnology.

In this we find the roots of the opposition that has grown up in modern times to eugenic theory. Lost in egotism, eugenics has also met with opposition arising from misguided and imprudent altruism. Only scientific altruism renders it once more practicable.

Early Infanticide

To return to our theme, from the early origins of primitive eugenic practice in the unreflective intuition of the atavistic past, eugenic theory became an increasingly conscious practice among the Greeks until it finally flowered in the pages of Aristotle, only to become lost from view amid the throes of a pessimistic and decadent age that followed the collapse of the golden age of Greece.

Infanticide and exposure, terms which in early ages were virtually synonymous, appear on first consideration to have been practiced among uncivilized tribes for a bewildering multiplicity of reasons. There is the female infanticide of China and the Isles of the Southern Pacific, the male infanticide of the Abipones of Paraguay. There are the Carthaginians who sacrificed their children to Kronos, the Mexicans to the rain god. There is the murder of twins and albinos in Arebo, and the cannibalism of the aborigines.

Co-existing with all these various practices there is the definitely eugenic motive. Among the aborigines, deformed children were killed as soon as born. The natives of Guiana killed any child that was " deformed, feeble, or bothersome." The Fans killed sickly children.

The question arises, therefore, whether the eugenic motive first led to the institution of infanticide, or whether it was merely a by-product, a later growth, springing out of a practice which owed its inception to totally different causes. Setting aside infanticide when prompted by mere brutality or cannibalistic cravings, the motives may be classified as irrational or rational.

Irrational motives are the religious or superstitious, rational the eugenic. Between these two there is a wide line of demarcation.

The origin of religious infanticide is obscure. There may be in it something of a sacramental meal, or possibly the primal idea in its many variations is the gain of some benefit by the sacrifice of something of value. In any case, whatever the basic intention, the religious motive in infanticide has no relation to the eugenic. Such melancholy theology implies some degree of social organization, and was, therefore, a later and independent conception.

Even before man became his own worst enemy, brute creation must have furnished formidable foes to the naked and defenseless savage. Under pressure of want, the group must adjust their numbers to the available food; under pressure of war, the same problem rises in still more urgent form. From these circumstances arises the practice of infanticide. It is circumstance, says Plato,and not man, which makes the laws.

The nomadic group, passing from district to district in search of food, would find the children a burden. The earliest infanticides, casual rather than premeditated, were probably in the nature of a desertion. This preparing the way for an extension of the practice would lead to its adoption in the attempt to adjust numbers to the available food-supply. In the same way non-producers and non-combatants would be regarded in the nature of impedimenta, since they consumed food without benefiting the group in return.

The first system of infanticide is therefore a policy of immediate need. The first victims would probably be infants who were severely deformed, the maimed, and the weaklings, and female infanticide might also follow. We have evidence of Neanderthal adults who were cared for by their compatriots even though by accident they had suffered crippling handicaps. But newborn infants have not yet been emotionally integrated into the group.

Infanticide in the Classical World

Infanticide, sanctioned by long usage, eventually passed into the custom, and subsequently into the laws of several civilized nations. It appears in the legislation of Solon, while at Rome it was ordained by the Twelve Tables for a definitely eugenic motive. A child conspicuously deformed was to be immediately destroyed. But this limitation was frustrated by the control conceded to the father, which power, restricted in Greece by all legislators alike, was absolute in Rome as in Gaul.

So at Rome the eugenic motive fades into the background, and abuses become so frequent that they have to be checked by further legislation. Romulus is said to have forbidden the murder of sons and first-born daughters, and the "Lex Gentilicia" of the Fabii, who were in danger of extinction, decreed that every child born must be reared.

Under the Empire we find Seneca asserting once more the eugenic justification of infanticide. "We drown the weakling and the monstrosity. It is not passion, but reason, to separate the useless from the fit." Two distinct tendencies appear, control of reproduction diminishing infanticide among the upper classes, exposure taking its place among the lower.

The lower classes, on the contrary, propagating recklessly amid extreme pauperism -- for rapid multiplication was then as now a frequent concomitant of bad environment -- resorted to unselective exposure, which is the antithesis of eugenic infanticide. Quintilian, indeed, declared that the exposed rarely survived, but the possibilities of acquiring a free slave by saving an abandoned infant must have led to frequent preservation -- "vel ad lupanar vel ad servitutem." Occasionally the luckless child falls into the hands of unscrupulous mendicants, who maim it and exhibit it for gain.

So the Christian Councils and the Christian Emperors set themselves vehemently to oppose the practice, but, using palliation instead of prevention, relieved the world of one problem and left another in its place. Despite the legislation of Constantine, Valentinian, and Justinian, exposure continued. Marble vessels were set up at the doors of the churches, and gradually there came into being hospitals, asylums, refuges, crèches, receiving and tending the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the crippled, and defective, regardless of whether these were congenitally handicapped or the unhappy products of accident or disease. Out of the failure of the Christian Fathers to find the right solution to a difficult problem arose what late nineteenth century eugenists (sic) perceived as an imperative need for the scientific altruism of eugenics practices.

Beyond infanticide, which, despite its many perversions, was in part eugenic, the Romans made no conscious effort to build a scheme of racial regeneration. Whatever the appeal of "patient Lacedaemon" to the sentimental vulgarity of the Romans, they learnt no lesson from their admiration, though the biographer of Lycurgus lectured to Domitian. In the crude scheme of the Germans, Tacitus finds no eugenic moral.

Restrictive marriage, perhaps, would have been a perilous lesson to teach to the Caesars, who, from Julius the epileptic to Nero the madman, may have suffered from hereditary insanity. Pliny's boast that for 600 years Rome had known no doctors shows that there was little interest among the Romans in schemes of hygiene or social reform. The Greeks themselves had forgotten, by the time they came under Roman domination, the teaching of Plato and Aristotle. Eugenics was lost in Stoicism, and Stoicism was the creed of the Empire.

"This age is worse than the previous age, and our father will beget worse offspring still," declared Horace; and Aratus voices again the lament of Horace: "What an age the golden sires have left behind them, and your children will be worse even than you!"The Golden Age of Rome lay forever in the past.

Legislated Eugenics

In Greece, the theory underwent a "logical development." State-controlled infanticide passes into a definite scheme of negative eugenics. The negative aspect, giving rise to the positive, fades into the background, and is retained merely as a check on the imperfections of a constructive scheme.

The systematized infanticide of Sparta, so far from being a recrudescence to atavism, is an advance towards civilization. A custom which had been so deeply implanted in the race by ages of barbarism, and had resisted for centuries the incessant pressure of the Christian Fathers at Rome, would not easily have been uprooted in Greece. To supersede the reckless and capricious brutality of individuals by state infanticide on a definite basis was an essential gain to humanity.

The destiny of the new-born child is no longer decreed in the privacy of the home; it is brought instead into the Council Hall before the Elders of the tribe. If well set up and strong, the child is to be reared; otherwise, doomed as useless, it is cast into the fateful chasm on the slopes of Mount Taygetus, for they hold that "it was better for the child and the city that one not born from the beginning to comeliness and strength should not live."

Selective infanticide could only rest on a physical basis; there was no speculation in latent capacity. There was no list of unhealthy geniuses in the annals of Sparta, no St. Paul, no Mohammed, no Schumann, no De Quincey. Even if selection had been less rigorous, and physically handicapped genius had been conceded the right to live, environment would frequently have denied it the right to develop. Sparta, content that Athens should be the Kulturstaat of Greece, cared only that the military hegemony should be her unchallenged right.

Once infanticide had become a system, its recognition as a pis aller would suggest regulation of marriage. By retention of infanticide as ancillary to the constructive scheme of eugenics, the anomalies of heredity admitted of a simple and ruthless solution.

Positive eugenics, not only in the past, but also today, is based on the analogy of animal breeding. The Spartans were the first to realize the inconsistency of improving the breed of their dogs and horses, and leaving to human kind the reckless propagation of the mentally defective, the diseased, and the unfit.

The use of analogy presents many pitfalls to be surmounted, and it is easy to see the absurdity of any conception of eugenics as a sort of higher cattle-breeding. Full experimental control is not possible with man as it is with animals and plants. The analogy, literally accepted, would require a race of supermen, or some outside scientific authority manipulating a lower stock for its own advantage. Human eugenics, to be effective, can never be purely voluntary, unless it results from a new ethical sense of the individual's relation to the social group.

In the second place, the whole world of spiritual motives lies outside the province of the breeder. He is faced with no problem of differentiation. With a clear and homogeneous ideal before him, he sets himself to its attainment, killing and preserving with simple and ruthless precision. The Spartan system was a more lofty spiritualization. There was no cold-blooded selection of partners, no interference with sexual attraction, no interference with human emotions. The Spartans, within these limits, were unfettered in their choice of brides, but were punished for abuse of the liberty conceded them. There was a penalty appointed for celibacy, a penalty for late marriage, but the third and the greatest penalty was for a bad marriage.

A further concession, the privilege only of the worthy, is seen in the compliances permitted on the part of the wife, that she might produce children for the state. So far from this practice being a recrudescence to the habits of the early savage, or an instance of an Aryan custom akin to the Hebrew Levirate, it seems obvious that it was a eugenic measure suggested by the analogy of the breeder. Thus, within eugenic limits considerable play was conceded to human personality.

It is true that the bearing of children was regarded as the essential function of women, and this view, though biologically justified, seems to ignore that other aspect of marriage -- mutual assistance and companionship. But even in democratic Athens the ideal of a Nausicaa, Penelope, or Andromache, had been superseded long since by a conception of wives which regarded them as of little more than procreative importance. Love marriages and genuine affection were more common in Sparta than in Athens. The conduct of Agesistrata and Kratesickleia on the death of their husbands, though it is evidence at a later date, shows traces of genuine feeling. In this respect, therefore, the Spartan practice was not remote from modern ideals, but infanticide, eliminating the unfit at birth, offered a solution of the problem which we can only hope to solve by the scientific application of the principles of heredity.

In Ancient Sparta

The Spartan method of breeding avoided the pitfalls of analogy; their aim implied a literal acceptance. The modern problem is the selection of qualities on a basis broad enough to represent the many qualities that distinguish individuals and nations, the problem of a eugenic ethnology. The Spartans, like the breeder of animals, bred for a single quality, and a single uniform type. Setting life on a physical basis, regarding bodily efficiency as the only quality of use to a military brotherhood, they pursued their aim with the ruthless precision of the breeder. It was a narrow and egotistical aim, but consistent with a constructive scheme of eugenics which can only be maintained by eliminating undesired elements at birth.

At the same time the selection of racial physique as a criterion has certain obvious advantages. To the Greeks, believing only in the beauty of the spirit when reflected in the beauty of the flesh, the good body was the necessary correlation of the good soul. Though there was no conscious assertion of this relation among the Spartans, there may have been some latent recognition helping to justify their aim. Moreover, while there is no dynamometer of intelligence, physique admits of easy estimation. There is therefore a certain justification for the simple dogma of the Spartan lawgiver: "If the parents are strong, the children will be strong."

The Spartans realized that to secure the fitness of the child it must be guarded even before birth by bestowing due care on the food and habits of the future mother. Antenatal influences explain many of the apparent anomalies of heredity, but, while recognizing the value of the Spartan aim, a nobler conception of humanity rejects their method. Sedentary occupations can no longer be assigned to slaves. Society still rests on a basis of lower labour. He "that holdeth the plough" must still "maintain the state of the world," but he is no longer a mere means, a living instrument, excluded from every political privilege and every social reform. The aristocratic eugenic practices of Sparta are amplified into a schema which embraces every class of the community. But this extension involves fresh complexities. By state interference in various ways, such as endeavours to modify " the influence of the factory system on the women who would be the mothers of the next generation," we attempt to palliate where the Spartans were content to neglect.

The Spartans recognized that environment as well as heredity is a factor in the development of man. There is a scheme of physical education for men and women, and the one narrow aim was so exclusively pursued, that it was said of them that they could not even read. There is to be compulsory education, and there is an institution which is to be frequented by all children, on whose development there is no effective control at home. These methodically organized institutions, harmonizing well enough with the monistic view of the Spartan state, could never be adjusted to modern conceptions of individual right.

Apart from the question of quality, there is also the question of quantity. Modern eugenists are faced with the problem of the diminishing numbers of the professional and creative classes and of the rapid multiplication of the less competent. The Spartans were concerned with the same problem in a different aspect: the rapid reproduction of the under class and slaves.

The Spartans entered Greece as a small conquering nation of Dorians, subjugating an extensive and powerful autochthonous population -- they lived as an armed camp in the centre of a hostile population which they dominated. "We are few in the midst of many enemies" was the warning spoken by Brasidas, and this position of constant danger affected the problem in two ways. There must be no falling birth-rate among the Spartans, no unchecked fertility among their subjects. Three measures were employed to maintain the number of the Spartans: prevention of emigration, penalties for celibacy, and rewards for fertility. The man with three children was to be excused the night watch, the man with four was to be immune from taxation. A third measure known to the ancient world, the enfranchisement of aliens, though adopted at times under the ancient kings, was rendered impossible by the later exclusion of every foreigner from the land. Avoidance of moral or physical corruption was set before preservation of numbers. The alien is always a disturbing element in any eugenic scheme.

The natural tendency of civilization, a declining birth-rate, would have brought destruction upon Sparta. Nevertheless, this attempt to maintain the numbers of the citizens seems to have met with little success. Xenophon speaks of Sparta as having the smallest population in Greece. Aristotle tells us that once the numbers of the Spartans amounted to 10,000: in his time they were not even 1,000, though the country was able to support 1,500 horse and 30,000 foot. The city unable to support one shock was ruined. Aristotle finds the cause of failure in the unequal division of property. But nowhere have attempts to interfere with the downward course of the birth-rate met with success: they were doomed to failure in Sparta as they failed in Imperial Rome. There is a moral in the tale of Plutarch, that Antiorus, the only son of Lycurgus, died childless, dooming the race to extinction.

In limiting the numbers of the subject population, the drastic methods of the ruling Spartans admitted of no failure. Infanticide was brutal, but it was set on a rational basis; this indiscriminate and covert massacre, on the vague pretext of fear or suspicion, was possible only to a people not fully emerged from barbarism. On one occasion more than 2,000 were made away with, "on account of their youth and great numbers." Even Plutarch, with all his Laconism, censured the massacre as an "abominable work," and refused it a place among the measures of Lycurgus.

These inchoate eugenics had their measure of success. Surrounded by discontented subjects and hostile serfs, with enemies at their very doors, and no point in the land a day's march away, it was natural that they had no share in the progress of the world around them. But in the seventh century Lyric poetry had found a home on the banks of the Eurotus. Terpander the Lesbian, Alcman the Lydian, Cinaethon the Spartan, show that there was a time when Lacedaemon had cultivated the Muses. The nobles lived luxuriously: the individual was free.

The Lycurgean discipline was therefore no arbitrary product of circumstances: it was a deliberate and calculated policy. As such, it is easy to criticize its limitations, to assert that it mistook the means for the end, that it fitted the citizen only for war, and unfitted him for peace. It is wilful neglect of facts to declare that the only success achieved was the success of the disciplined against the undisciplined: that the only veneration the Spartans received was the veneration of conquerors.

Their whole aim was narrow, calculated, and egotistic; their eugenic system was merely ancillary to the one occupation of war: neglecting all the complexity of man's psychical nature, it aimed at the improvement of a single aspect of humanity, and that not the highest: sacrificing the Sudra caste in the interests of the Brahmins, it aimed only at the production of a breed of supermen. Nevertheless, it is clear that within its narrow confines this rude system succeeded. Sparta has been proclaimed the only state in which the physical improvement of the race was undoubted, while the chastity and refinement of both sexes were unimpaired. "It is easy to see," declared Xenophon, "that these measures with regard to child-bearing, opposed as they were to the customs of the rest of Greece, produced a race excelling in size and strength. Not easily would one find people healthier or more physically useful than the Spartans."

The Lampito of Aristophanes, introduced as the representative of her race, shows how the Spartan women impressed the rest of Greece. Beauty, physique, self-control -- these were the accepted characteristics of the type. Sparta was the proverbial land of "fair women."

The direct influence of Spartan eugenics beyond Sparta was infinitesimal. It was an honour to have a Spartan nurse and good form to affect the rude abruptness of the Spartan manner, but no attempt was ever made to adopt their training or institutions.

But Sparta, too, fell into decadence, as a result of constant losses in war. Xenophon lamented that in his time the Spartans obeyed neither God nor the Laws of Lycurgus. Already, when Plato wrote the Laws, there are signs that Sparta was falling into disrepute, and the politics of Aristotle shows an imminent degeneracy: Ares bears the yoke of Aphrodite, liberty has become license. Agis III attempted in vain to restore the old Lycurgean discipline, which had become a mere shadow and a name. Kleomenes attained some measure of success, but foreign arms intervened. Nevertheless, the empty husk of the ancient system lasted with strange persistence through centuries of neglect.

The fifth century at Athens was an age of criticism and self-consciousness: the era of reflection had followed the era of intuition, and skepticism brought iconoclasm which shattered the ancient symbols. There were abolitionists, collectivists, social reformers in every phase, but no scheme of eugenics till Plato.

There were the eugenic paper polities of Plato and Diogenes, but their legacy to the world was only "words and writings." The Athenians of the fifth century had nothing but contempt for the institutions of their rivals, voiced in the patriotic travesties of Euripides. Sparta was the national foe.

The intensity of anti-Spartan sentiment may have put such theories beyond the pale of the patriot. Social reformers could find their arguments for communism or promiscuity among Hyperboreans, Libyans, and Agathyrsi; but eugenics was a creed peculiar to the hereditary foe. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the question had been for centuries the commonplace of Greek thought. Even in the proverbial stage of Greek philosophy the gnomic poets among their isolated apothegms have caught some facets of the truth.

In Theognis there is a glimpse of the analogy between the breeding of animals and human kind and almost an anticipatory scheme of Eugenics: "We seek well-bred rams and sheep and horses and one wishes to breed from these. Yet a good man is willing to marry an evil wife, if she bring him wealth: nor does a woman refuse to marry an evil husband who is rich. For men reverence money, and the good marry the evil, and the evil the good. Wealth has confounded the race."

"His starting-point is the true one," remarks the ancient commentator, "for he begins with good birth. He thought that neither man nor any other living creature could be good unless those who were to give him birth were good. So he used the analogy of other animals which are not reared carelessly, but tended with individual attention that they may be noblest. These words of the poet show that men do not know how to bear children, and so the race degenerates, the worse ever mingling with the better. Most people imagine that the poet is merely indicting the custom of marrying the low-born and vicious for the sake of money. To me it seems that this is an indictment of man' s ignorance of his own life." Lycurgus, according to Plutarch, used this analogy to demonstrate the folly of other cities where the husbands, keeping their wives in seclusion, beget children from them even if mad, diseased, or past their prime. This was the starting- point of the Spartan eugenics, as it has been the starting-point of the modern: at Athens it was never more than the sententious maxim of an early poet.

The evils of disparity of age, the thought that "one must consider the ages of those who are brought together," had formed themes for Hesiod,Sappho,and Theognis. Pythagoras, it is said, had discussed the bad effects of early marriage:Solon had legislated upon it; and had dealt no less with that other recognized evil of antiquity and modern times, the mercenary marriage.

A problem that obsessed the Greeks was the relative influence of nature and nurture, of gametic and non-gametic causes. It is a question almost invariably of morals, though the dominant aestheticism of Greek thought may have reduced the problem to a single issue: "Thou art unpleasing to look upon and thy character is like to thy form."

"Most children are worse than their parents, few are better." "The evil are not wholly evil from birth, but associating with the evil they have learnt unseemly deeds." "Sometimes a noble offspring does not spring from well-born parents, nor an evil child from useless parents." But the general view of heredity was as fatalistic as Ibsenism. No education can make the bad man good: no Aesculapius can cure the moral taint. Just as roses and hyacinths do not spring from squills, so from a slave-woman no free child can be born. Antigone of Sophocles is fierce because her father was fierce, just as the brand of Ibsen was obstinate because his mother was obstinate.

Modern knowledge has justified the Greeks in attributing this dominance to heredity. Men do not gather grapes from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles: the total contribution of environment is merely opportunity; it can only aid or retard the development of genetic character. The Greeks, except in the dramatic conception of an ancestral curse, or in the inherited pollution of ancient sacrilege, seldom traced causes back beyond the immediate progenitors. Galton held that the individual was the arithmetic mean of three different quantities, his father and mother, and the whole species of maternal and paternal ancestors, going back in a double series to the very beginnings of all life. Greek thought never concerned itself with this third and unknown datum.

Side by side with this interest in questions of nature and nurture is the dawn of that individualistic spirit, which culminated at last in egotistic contempt of offspring and marriage. Heraclitus is the forerunner of Stoicism, Democritus of Epicureanism, and the negative teaching of the sophists is the precursor of that atomistic conception of society which reduced it to a mere complex of self-centred units.

If there had been any attempt to systematize these fragmentary conceptions, we should find it mirrored in the pages of Euripides. All the inconsistencies of current theory are voiced by opposing characters, every speculation that was born "in that great seething chaos of hope and despair," thesis and antithesis but no synthesis before Plato. It is the diagnosis and not the remedy which interests Euripides.

There is the question of the marriage age. It is a baneful thing to give one's children in wedlock to the aged. The aged husband is a bane to the youthful wife. No less is it an evil to wed youth to youth, for the vigour of the husband endures for longer, but a woman more quickly fades from her prime.

    There is the denunciation, too, of mercenary marriage. Those who marry for position or wealth know not how to marry. Nature endures, wealth is fleeting. Is it not therefore the duty of the man, who takes good counsel, to marry the noble, and to give in marriage among the noble, and to have no desire for an evil wedlock, even if one should thereby win a wealthy dower? There is much discussion of the relative influence of heredity and environment. Is it not wonderful that poor soil, blest with a favourable season from the gods, bears corn in abundance, whilst good soil, deprived of what it should have received, yields but a poor crop, yet with human kind the worthless is always base, the noble never anything but noble? Is it the parents who make the difference, or the modes of training? And the answer of the ancients was that "Nature is greatest." There is the old adage that no good child will ever come from an evil parent. The opinion that children resemble their parents is oftentimes proved true. Noble children are born from noble sires, the base are like in nature to their father. If one were to yoke good with bad, no good offspring would be born; but if both parents are good, they will bear noble children. Nevertheless, mortal natures are complex things; a child of no account may be born of a noble sire, and good children from evil parents, but no education can transform the bad child of evil stock. The fairest girl that one can give children is to be born of noble parents. "I bid all mortals beget well-born children from noble sires." And the well-born man is the man who is noble in character, not the unjust man, though he be born of a better father than Zeus.

    Nevertheless, it remains a duty to educate one's children well. Specialized athleticism was regarded as baneful as over-refinement. You cannot fight an enemy with quoits, nor drive them out with the fist. Though war is an evil, military training is an advantage to youth.

    Euripides reflects no less the growing cynicism of the age, abusing women, praising celibacy, denouncing the cares and anxieties of bringing up children. There is something, too, of the philosophic egotism of Marcus Aurelius: if you marry, your children may turn out evil; if they are good there is the fear of losing them. But in the Ion he speaks with the voice of the old Athenian morality: "I hate the childless, and blame the man to whom such a life seems good."

    There is one passage which served as a text for Plutarch's treatise on education, and might serve no less today as a text for modern eugenics: (Greek Unreproducable - reference, Plut., "De Edu.," 2; "H. F.," I264.)

    Aristophanes also reflects all the foibles and obsessions of a skeptical age. The existence of eugenics at Sparta, robbing the theory of something of the revolutionary aspect which it wears today, would perhaps have rendered it less a feature for debate than community of wives or women' s rights. 

The Thought of Socrates

Nevertheless, if eugenics had ever taken a prominent place in Athenian thought, it would have furnished a richer mine of parody than the fantastic obscenity of the Ecclesiazusae. It is commonly held that Socrates suggested all the thought and philosophy of the succeeding centuries. We should expect, therefore, to find some cartography, as it were, of eugenics paving the way for the fuller imaginings of his pupil Plato. If we regard Xenophon as the only trustworthy source for the oral teachings of Socrates, we may seek in the "Memorabilia" for these earlier adumbrations.

We find the old question of nature and nurture, and with it an attempt to solve the problems of heredity. How is it, asks Hippias, "that parents of good stock do not always produce children as good?" To put the dilemma in a modern form, Why is it that personal value is not necessarily the same as reproductive value? And the answer which Socrates suggests is an answer which has been given to the same question today." Good stock is not everything; both parents must be equally in their prime." The apparent anomalies which children present in not reproducing the qualities of their parents only serve to reveal the presence of particular conditions, and among those conditions must be included the changes which organism undergoes by reason of advancing age.

There are other conditions also. Eugenics begins earlier than birth; the unborn child must be protected by bestowing due care on the future mother. A man, says Socrates, has a twofold duty: towards his wife, to cherish her who is to raise up children along with him, and towards children yet unborn, to provide them with things which he thinks will contribute to their well-being. The fatal handicap may have already begun in the starving or overworking of the mother.

But congenital ability must be emphasized by education: Socrates is deeply impressed with the evils of its neglect both on the physical and spiritual side. The Athenians, not content with neglecting a good habit, laugh to scorn those who are careful in the matter. When will the Athenians pay strict attention to the body? While Euripides denounces the baneful effect of the great athletic festivals, Socrates laments the indifference which could produce an Epigones.

It is no aesthetic view of morals which makes Socrates insist on the need of physical training: he is concerned rather with the effect of ill-health upon the mind: the reasoning powers suffer atrophy: ill health may expel all knowledge from a man.

There must be moral education no less than physical training. "Corruptio optimi pessima" is the warning of Socrates as well as of Plato. The youth with the best natural endowments will, if trained, prove superlatively good. Leave him untrained, and he will become, not merely evil, but degenerate beyond hope of reclaim. The very magnificence of his character makes it impossible to restrain him.

In the Socratic treatment of eugenic questions there are traces of that individualistic spirit which, neglecting social aspects and regarding only personal consequences, led on in logical succession to abnegation of marriage and offspring. It is not mere momentary desire, says Socrates, which influences human beings in the production of children; nothing is plainer than the pains we take to seek out wives who shall bear us the finest children. And the penalty for error is the penalty, not of human, but of Divine law. What worse calamity can befall a man than to produce misbegotten children! And so with training: because the city has instituted no public military training there is no need to neglect it in private. No demonstration of a self- incurred penalty is likely to appeal to the degenerate or feeble-minded

Critias, the pupil of Socrates, seems to have advocated something like a Spartan system of eugenics. "I begin with man's birth, showing how he may become best and strongest in body, if the father trains and undergoes hardship, and the future mother is strong and also trains. " But a complete development along Spartan lines begins with Plato, and Socrates led not only to Plato, but to Cynic and Cyrenaic individualism.

Nevertheless, the incivism of the cynic, bringing with it the belief in a self-centered and isolated self, never involved, like the later asceticism, the entire uprooting of all sexual desire. The wise man will marry for the sake of children, associating with the most comely. Antisthenes employed analogy from animal life, but it served only to point the cry of abandonment of cities and civilization, and return to the simple and primitive. The Cyrenaic no less is *{Greek word cannot be represented}, and equally an egotist; but complete negation of social duties and actualization of despair was only possible when Greece had lost forever the ideal of the city state.

The Eugenics of Plato

Sparta conceived the first system of practical eugenics; the first formulation in theory belongs to Plato. Archytas of Tarentum, Phaleas of Chalcedon, and Hippodamus, the Haussman of the Piraeus, may have anticipated the Platonic communism: the Platonic eugenics is based on no utopia, but on a living and successful community. The scheme of the Republic, though it owes a little to contemporary thought, something also to contemporary science, is most of all a speculative development of the Spartan system. In this respect one cannot speak of the Platonic Republic as the perfection of the laws of Lycurgus; nor can it be truly said that if Lycurgus had only put his scheme in writing, it would have appeared far more chimerical than the Platonic.

But the Platonic dialogues, and on a higher scale the concise lecture notes of Aristotle, are not the mere exfoliation of a finished product of thought, but a gradual development. One idea devours another; there is thesis and antithesis, and the final synthesis, if achieved at all, is found at the end and not at the beginning. When Plato came to formulate a positive scheme of eugenics, his Spartan model seemed to show him that infanticide in some form was inevitable, when there was no knowledge to control the vagaries of nature. It was the ancient solution of the problem of heredity, and is still the solution of the breeder who "breeds a great many and kills a great many." So the issue of inferior parents and defective children born of good stock are to be "hidden away." Concealment is the Platonic euphemism for infanticide.

There are two types whom Plato would condemn to natural elimination --the victims of constitutional ill-health, and the victims of selfindulgence. Refused medical aid, they are allowed to linger on, but there is no hint of segregation or custodial care to exclude them from parenthood. Under the later eugenic scheme it is clear that the offspring of any such unions would have been ruthlessly exterminated: there was no place in the Platonic Republic for the "unkempt" man, glorying in a pedigree of congenital ailment. Today the limitations of our knowledge render restrictive measures possible only in the case of the feeble-minded.

But apart from the physical degenerate, there is the moral degenerate, no mere encumbrance to society, but an active force for evil. No law of nature operates for his elimination; therefore, like the lower desires of the soul which cannot be tamed to service under the higher self, his growth must be stopped. Society has no course but to put him out of the way. The modern treatment of the morally incurable is humaner than the Platonic, yet lacking in humanity. We pity degeneracy when it takes the form of disease, but when it takes the form of immorality or crime we blame and we punish. The habitual criminal is no less a victim of heredity than the prisoner in Erewhon, "convicted of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consumption."

Plato bases his constructive scheme on that analogy of the breeder which has formed the premises, latent or confessed, for all constructive eugenics from the days of Lycurgus. "What very first-rate men our rulers ought to be," says Socrates, "if the analogy of animal holds good with regard to the human race!" Glaucon, accepting the analogy literally and without limitation, justifies the harshest strictures that have been levelled against any such conception of eugenics. In the Platonic Republic, though not in Sparta, there is a race of supermen, the breeders of the human kingdom, arbitrarily interfering with natural instinct in order to produce a noble stock. Plato, recognizing that even in Greece there were limits set to the sphere of the legislator, and unable to appeal to the cogency of assured knowledge to support his philosophic imperatives, resorts instead to childish subterfuge, "an ingenious system of lots."

But compulsion, or guidance, however veiled, is foredoomed to failure in the case of an institution which can only rest on inclination or an innate sense of duty. Moreover, "custom is lord of all," and custom can only be modified gradually and in the course of centuries: it is only the thinnest surface layer with which the legislator can tamper. No social reform or political progress can be effected by the arbitrary creation of institutions to which there are no answering ideas: external coercion with no correspondent reaction can achieve no permanent good. The basis of law is subjective. Even modern eugenists recognized that, if there were to be eugenics by legislation, the eugenic ideal must first be absorbed into the conscience of the nation.

The Spartan system of "compliances" developed into a system whereby the best of both sexes were to be brought together as often as possible, and the worst as infrequently as possible. Greater liberty is to be allowed to the brave warrior, but a liberty within restricted limits, and the concession is not for the sake of the individual, but for the good of the state. Plato is the slave of his analogy.

As at Sparta, there is regulation of the marriage age, a commonplace of contemporary thought, and therefore an inevitable feature of any eugenic system. The parents must be in their prime of life: this period is defined as twenty years in a woman, thirty in a man. A woman may bear children to the state till she is forty; a man beginning at twenty-five, when he has passed "the first sharp burst of life," may continue to beget children until he is fifty-five. For both in man and woman these years are the prime of physical as well as of intellectual vigour. In Sparta we hear of no definite regulation concerning those who have passed their prime, beyond exclusion from child-bearing. Plato' s treatment of the problem is "the only point in this part of the Republic which is in any sense immoral, and a point upon which modern ethics may well censure the highest Greek morals."

As to that second problem, the selection of qualities to select for, Plato, like Sparta, chose physique, but chose it because he believed that soul and body are racial attributes that are linked in inheritance. There is no fairer spectacle than that of a man who combines beauty of soul and beauty of form. Physical and intellectual vigour ripen simultaneously. Modern eugenists no less hold it a legitimate working hypothesis that the vehicle of mental inheritance is at bottom material. There is a further requirement that parents should as far as possible be of similar nature.

There is no mention in the Republic of that care for the future mother which was a feature of the Spartan system. But there is a twofold scheme of education adapted for the development of other qualifies than the merely physical, the first diverging little from the customary education of the day, and then that second formulation which was to culminate in the knowledge of the good itself. Once he had shaken himself free from the military ideals of Sparta, Plato, concerned no longer to write a tract for the times, ends by building an ideal city where only gods or sons of gods could live.

In this scheme of education it is recognized that environment no less than heredity plays a part in the development of the individual. The banks of the stream must be cleansed as well as its source. Good environment is the keystone of the Platonic system; its essence is "nurture." The young citizen is like an animal at pasture; from the things all about him he assimilates good and evil, and what he gathers from his environment becomes embodied in his character. A gifted soul in vitiated surroundings is like a rare exotic sown in unfavourable soil; gradually losing its true nature: it sinks at last to the level of its surroundings. But after all "Nature is greatest." There are lower desires which no good influence can ever spiritualize. Education can only turn to the light the intrinsic capacities of the soul.

The relative influence of these two factors has been expressed in much the same terms today. Men have a considerable capacity for being moulded by environment, no small susceptibility to the influences of education and early training. But these influences operate in a circumscribed sphere. There is in the brain at birth a proclivity towards certain directions rather than others: to this original inherited capacity environment can add nothing; it can only develop or frustrate it. The modern socialist who contends that all men should and can be made equal would find no friend in Plato any more than in modern eugenists.

The Platonic conception of marriage implies an irrational universe. Personal inclination is to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Nevertheless, Plato recognized the power of "myriad voices" of opinion. In the case of marriages, births, and patrimonies he swerves from the rules laid down for the former commonwealth by making marriages an affair of individuals, and the business of the suitors themselves private." He realizes that legal compulsion in such matters would arouse anger and ridicule. Therefore, like modem eugenists, he would trust to the power of public opinion.

The state is to be monogamous, and, as in Sparta and the Republic, there is regulation of the marriage age. A woman is to marry between the ages of sixteen and twenty, a man not earlier than twenty-five or thirty, and not later than thirty-five. The period of child-bearing is to last for ten years; at the end of that period, if there are no children and the parents are free from censure, honourable divorce is to be conceded.

As at Sparta, there is to be care for the future child, set on a wider basis of science. There are times when incontinence, ill-health, moral delinquency of any kind leave their impress upon the mind or body of the offspring. Parents must bear in mind that they are handing down the torch of life to future generations.

Eugenics is being studied from the point of view of medical science. Already in the Republic Plato had owed something to the teaching of Hippocrates, and in this discussion of prenatal influences we may trace a further debt. To form a child from birth to the best constitution, first of all care must be taken of the seed itself, then of food, drink, exercise, quiet, sleep, desires, and other things, all of which Plato has carefully studied.

The educational scheme of the Laws is a very different thing from that of the Republic. Pitched at a level which makes it possible for all, it leads to no final knowledge of the good. There are public infant schools, but education is to cease after the age of six. Besides gymnastic and music, there is some training in the sciences, but the ideal is Pythagorean rather than Platonic.

No less than in the Republic, in the Laws Plato recognizes that education by itself cannot achieve everything. Men well educated become good men: without gymnastic and other education neither soul nor body will ever be of much account. But a fortunate nature is as necessary as a good education, and those of the Athenians who become good men become good without constraint by their own natures. Only a few can achieve perfect happiness, and these are they who, divine and temperate, and gifted with all other virtues by nature, have also received everything which good education could impart.

In addition to education and heredity, Plato, influenced, perhaps, by the treatise of Hippocrates, recognizes the influence of material environment. There is a difference in places, and some beget better men and others worse. Some places are subject to strange and fatal influences by reason of diverse winds and violent heats or the character of the waters. Again, there is the character of the food supplied by the earth, which not only affects the bodies of men for good or evil, but produces the same result on their souls. But geographic environment cannot produce a given type of mind any more than education: it can only foster or thwart heredity. It merely determines what shall actually be by selective destruction of the incompatible. As to the negative aspect of this scheme, Plato would segregate the madman and expel the pauper. The madman is not to be seen in the city, but the responsibility rests upon the relatives, not upon the state. If they fail in their duty, the law will punish them. The treatment of the insane was a difficult problem in an age when there were no asylums.

There is another problem, also, which has assumed far larger proportions today owing to the growth of humanitarian sentiment -- and the enormous numbers of the modern state. Plato has a simple and ruthless way with the pauper. In a properly constituted state the righteous man will not be allowed to starve: there is no excuse for the beggar. "If such a one be found, he shall be driven out of the market-place, out of the city, out of the land, that the state may be purged of such a creature." When a city is small, there is no difficulty in maintaining the poor; such a prohibition might have been enforced without difficulty in an ancient state. Some may approve of the simple thoroughness of the Platonic method, but the complexity of modern conditions has rendered its adoption impossible.

In the eyes of the modern socialist, unemployed and unemployable alike are the victims of the social system: to the eugenist, the chronic pauper is often the victim of heredity. With increased genetic knowledge the modern state may be purged of the pauper more slowly, but no less surely, than the Platonic state of the Laws.

Plato, moreover, recognized bodily or mental defects as a bar to marriage, though not viewing the question from its eugenic aspect. He is concerned with the parents, and not with the children. The law does not forbid marriage with an orphan who is suffering from some defect; it merely refrains from compulsion. Modern eugenists, concerned with classifying such defects into transmissible and non-transmissible, regard the question from a different viewpoint. In the matter of inspection to decide the fitness of age for marriage there is something of the idea which came to life again in More's "Utopia" and Campanella's "City of the Sun."

Even in this endeavor to sacrifice ideals to possibilities there is still the apriorism of the visionary. There is more humanity, more concession to the infirmities of human nature, but little that comes within the scope of practical action. Neither the legislation of the Republic nor the precepts of the Laws could have ever realized the Platonic dream of eugenics. 

Aristotle -- The Culmination of Classic Eugenic Theory

From Plato we pass to Aristotle and the culminating period in the history of ancient eugenics. The Aristotelian scheme is almost entirely negative and restrictive. There is infanticide, but infanticide in its last phase, exposure of the imperfect and maimed, and, in the case of superfluous children, destruction of life in the germ. There is no fantastical scheme for the fusion of parental temperament, no rigid selection on the sole basis of physique.

Like Plato, Aristotle believed in the intimate relationship between psychological phenomena and physical conditions. Body stands to soul in the relation of matter to form, potentiality to actuality; soul is the entelechy of the body. Body being prior chronologically to soul, demands attention first, but only for the sake of the soul. Care, therefore, must be taken that the bodies of the children may answer the expectations of the legislator.

There is no need for a man to possess the physique of a wrestler in order to be the father of healthy children; neither must he be a valetudinarian nor physically degenerate. There is a via media between the extremes of specialized athleticism and physical incapacity, and it is this mean which is the desirable condition for both men and women. The valetudinarian who would have been left to die in the Republic may one day be eliminated by the humaner methods of Aristotle. There is much evidence to prove that physical weakness is a case of simple Mendelian transmission.

As at Sparta and in the states of the Republic and Laws, there is limitation of the marriage age. Aristotle recommends the difference of twenty years between the ages of husband and wife, or, more accurately, the difference between thirty-seven and eighteen. Comparison with the marriage age defined in the Republic and Laws shows that ancient thought had decreed no definite period. Four reasons incline Aristotle to select these ages. Since the procreative power of women stops at fifty, the harmony of the union will be preserved by insuring that husband and wife shall grow old at the same period of time. The disadvantages which attend too great nearness or distance in age between father and child are also avoided. More important than all, these ages, consulting the physical well-being of husband and wife, afford the best prospect of well-developed children.

It is possible to approve of the postponement of marriage till eighteen, or even later; but the limitation on disparity of ages seems unnecessarily severe. Aristotle, studying the results of early marriage in other cities, deplored what he saw as its baneful effect on physique.

Like Sparta and Plato, Aristotle forbade those past their prime to rear children to the state. Marriage is thus divided into two periods, and this first period is to last for seventeen years, not ten as in the Laws. Moreover, he would fix even the season for contracting marriage, and in conformity with Pythagoras and Greek custom generally, chooses Gamelion. Today it is held that neither the vitality of the offspring, their physique, nor their intellectual capacity, show any clear correlation with the season of birth. "There is no atavistic heritage of a special season for reproduction which the human race have originally shown analogous to what one finds today in many species of animals."

"The married couple ought also to regard the precepts of physicians and naturalists." Aristotle, belonging to an Asclepiad family, received the partly medical education which was traditional in such families. Some of his encyclopedic writings deal with medical subjects, and he is said to have practised medicine as an amateur. This is a further stage of the tendency which had begun with Plato's debt to Hippocrates.

Care for the child is to begin before the cradle. And Aristotle insists, like the Spartan legislator, on the avoidance of sedentary occupation and the need for a proper dietary. But he is concerned not only with effect on physique, but also, like Plato, with effect on the mind.

The first seven years of a child's life are to be spent at home, not in the creches of the Republic, nor in the public infant schools of Plato's Laws. This is to be a time of games, "mimicries of future earnest," under the charge of the inspectors of children, for Aristotle held with Plato that the majority of our likes and dislikes are formed in these early ages. Education is to run in cycles of seven years; the child is to be controlled at every period of its evolution. From the age of seven to puberty there are state-controlled gymnastics, but these gymnastics, unlike the Spartan, are merely a means to a further end -- the training of reason from puberty to the age of twenty- one. After this, education ceases, and the young man brings body and mind, fully developed, to the service of the state. Aristotle's scheme is merely adumbrated: there are scattered suggestions rather than coordination, and the last stage of science, which is to cultivate the reason, is never mentioned at all.

Aristotle, like the ancients generally, recognizes the importance of both environment and heredity. There are three stages in the formation of character, nature, custom, reason: innate potentiality, environment, self-direction by the light of a principle. We are born good, we have goodness thrust upon us, we achieve goodness. Heredity to Aristotle explains the slave just as certainly as it explains those who never will be slaves; yet to admit emancipation for all slaves is to confess that there is no slave by nature without the potentialities of full manhood. It is true that some men from the beginning are fit only for that lower work on which the fabric of society must rest. The maintenance of heterogeneity is an essential condition of progress: there must always be the minuti homines at the base of things, though we have long since passed from the permanent grades of Plato, Aristotle, and the Middle Ages. Plato, indeed, at one period seems to have conceded that the man from the copper class might rise to the silver or gold, and it is at this that social reform must aim, not to abolish class, but to provide that each individual shall, as far as possible, reach his proper stratum and remain in it.

Like Plato, Aristotle recognizes that there are victims of heredity who can never be made good by education. But this factor of heredity is amenable to no certain control. Helen may boast of her immortal lineage, but those who think it reasonable that as a man begets a man and a beast a beast, so from a good man a good man should be descended, these fail to see that, though such is the desire of nature, her failures are frequent. Nature's aim is perfection, to make this the best of all possible worlds; but there are failures because matter is not always congruous with form. But "Nature's defects are man's opportunities": matter must therefore be helped as far as possible to the realization of its true form by the human agency of education.

So much importance did Aristotle attach to education that, like Sparta, he would make it entirely an affair of the state. There is to be one educational authority and one sole system of education.

The laws of Aristotle are as catholic as the laws of Alfred: "the legislator must extend his views to everything." Therefore his eugenic scheme will be enforced by law. His aim is to embody public opinion in law, not to educate opinion to such a point that law will become unnecessary.

"Every city is constituted of quantity and quality." Aristotle, therefore, no less than Plato, would fix an ideal limit to the population as well as regulate its quality. In the Aristotelian scheme, as in the Platonic, there emerges a certain Malthusian element; but it is a legal ordinance and not a natural law: it is to prevent population from interfering with the equalization of lots, not from outrunning the limits of subsistence. He conceived that Plato's plan of unigeniture made it more than ever essential that there should not be too many sons in a household, and yet, in his view, the Platonic means were insufficient. But there is also the conception of the mean, of an enclosing limit flowing naturally from the teleological method. Just as a boat can no more be two furlongs long than a span long, so a state can no more have 100,000 citizens than ten. Its essence lies in the fact that it can easily be comprehended as a whole.

Yet, though Aristotle held the State to be a natural organism, he would not concede that hypertrophy was prevented by natural laws without the need for human cooperation. It is absurd to leave numbers to regulate themselves, according to the number of women who should happen to be childless, because this seems to occur in other cities. Rejecting as a mere palliative the remedy of colonization, which Pheidon of Corinth had suggested, and Plato had kept in the background of the Laws, he insisted that a limit must be set to the procreation of children, even during a seventeen years' term. When infractions occurred -- and one would imagine that under such circumstances they would be of frequent occurrence o there is not to be exposure, which is impious on the ground of superfluity, but destruction of life in the germ.

Today limitation of numbers among the upper classes of the community is being brought about naturally by the increase of foresight and self-control. It is the lower classes whose reckless propagation constitutes the problem of modern eugenics. Aristotle, denying these classes the rights of citizenship, and treating them politically as cyphers, sets them outside his scheme of social reform. The number of slaves, resident aliens, and foreigners, is to be left to chance, "and it is perhaps necessary that their numbers should be large."

The Aristotelian eugenics, therefore, are as selfish and parochial as the Spartan. As in the animal body, the homogeneous are for the sake of the heterogeneous. Where eugenics is most necessary, eugenics is denied; the man who performs a task which ruins his body or his mind is set beyond the pale as a mere living instrument. This was the simple pre-humanitarian solution of a difficult problem. But Aristotle recognized, as eugenists recognize today, that any scheme of constructive eugenics must be set aside as visionary and impracticable, so slender is our knowledge of the genetic processes of man. Aristotle, finding a scapegoat in a mythological nature, abandoned the problem as insoluble: today we are still seeking some outline of an analysis of human characters.

The chief interest of the Aristotelian eugenics lies in the fact that he set out to construct a scheme which should be practicable for Athens, no academic speculation in the clouds, but a possible plan of social reform. "The legislator must bear two things in mind -- what is possible and what is proper. It is not enough to perceive what is best without being able to put it in practice." Hence careful attention is paid to popular opinion and existing custom. The consensus mundi, the collective capacity of the many, are factors the importance of which he constantly emphasizes. This "divine fight of things as they are," involving a certain conservatism, led him to uphold any custom revealing after analysis a balance of good in its favour. Hence the acceptance of infanticide and slavery, and regulation of the marriage age. The doctrine of the mean also, which helped to decide the proper disposition of parents and to fix the number of the state, was an essential article of received opinion. If Athens had ever instituted a eugenic system, it would have been the system of Aristotle, not of Sparta or Plato. Aristotle, applying the idea of development to knowledge as well as to the objects of knowledge, not only conceived his own theories as a development of those of his predecessors, but imagined himself as standing at the culmination of Greek thought. This eschatology was justified. The politics not only set the final seal upon political science in Greece, it marks also the last word in eugenics.

Looking back upon these past systems, we find that the task was easier for a pre-Christian age which could sacrifice the lower classes in the interests of the higher and solve the problems of heredity by infanticide. Even when the influence of Sparta had died away and eugenics was regarded no longer as a mere ancillary to war, parochialism confined it to a single state, inhumanity to a single class. The features which are so prominent in all these early schemes

    Precise limitation of the marriage age and detailed schemes of education -- are features which, though still recognized, no longer have their place in the foreground of modern thought. 

The Greeks were concerned more with the banks of the stream; the modern aim is to control its source. The gradual process of social reform during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century has gradually brought us farther back in the course of successive stages. From measures of sanitation and factory laws we have passed to national schemes of education. A gradual extension of aim has led to efforts to guard the child at birth, even before birth; and, finally, eugenics has set itself to solve the problems of heredity. The "Life-History Albums" of Sir Francis Galton|Galton] would trace the workings of the ancestral curse, the Ate of inherited disease as well as of inherited sin: Mendelism would render possible a factorial analysis of the individual.

Nevertheless, though the Greeks abandoned the question of heredity in despair, and, unable to prevent its victims being born, slew them if possible at birth, they realized many of the problems which, 2, 000 years later, are still confronting eugenists, and they realized in part the remedies. It is wrong to say that antiquity never raised the question as to whether a hereditary disease or predisposition to disease should be a bar to marriage. The Spartans, Plato, Aristotle, all realized the problem, Plato returning to atavism for his remedy, Aristotle conceiving the humaner methods of modern eugenists. Sparta and Plato, too, were not blind to the need, today so urgent, of restrictive measures dealing with the insane, and Plato even dreamt of segregation. There is the recognition, also, that eugenics is the sphere of the physician as well as of the philosopher; that quantity is a factor in the problem as well as quality; that selective eugenics must regard the mental as well as the physical. But even that final formulation in the pages of Aristotle, which would have been possible to the age, and more possible today than the narrow scheme of Sparta or the unsubstantial visions of Plato, even these saner eugenics have in them much that is impossible, no little that is abhorrent, to thinkers of today. But the idea had been given life and brought to bear. Long after the sowers had passed away it sprang to renewed existence in a different age and in a different form, engendered by new conditions.

After Aristotle stretches a gulf of years in which eugenics lies amid the lumber of forgotten theory. The state education of the fourth century may have owed something to Plato and Aristotle, but there is no state control of marriage. Zeno and Chrysippus, influenced, perhaps, by a perverted Platonism, advocated community of wives. But Zeno taught that the intelligent man should avoid all public affairs except in a state approaching perfection; and Chrysippus, writing a treatise on the education of childhood, is reproached by Poseidonius for neglecting its first and most important stages, especially those before birth. "Poseidonius blames Chrysippus and admires what Plato taught about the formation of children while yet unborn."

No attempt was ever made to realize the ideals of the Republic "except by dreamers and somnambulists at second-hand in an age of mysticism and social degeneration." Plotinus obtained from the Emperor Gallienus and his wife the concession of a ruined city in Campania, which had once been founded by philosophers. He proposed to restore it, name it Platonopolis, and adopt the laws of Plato. This early anticipation of the Oneida Community never seems to have been realized.

In the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More, the marriage preliminaries, suggesting something of Plato's physical point of view, recall a passage in the Laws. But in Campanella's "City of the Sun" we find a closer approximation to the Platonic eugenics. Marriage, recognized as an affair of the state rather than of the individual, because the interests of future generations are involved, is only to be performed in the light of scientific knowledge. The "great master," who is a physician, aided by the chief matrons, is to supervise marriage, which will be confined to the valorous and high-spirited. There is to be a system of state education, and the women are trained for the most part like men in warlike and other exercises. Campanella has been called the prophet of modern eugenics: he is the connecting-link between the crude eugenics of the past and the scientific eugenic possibilities which are now emerging as a result of our increasing knowledge of human eugenics.

Decline in the Hellenic Age

Realizing only vaguely the difficulties with which modern science has encompassed the problem, the ancients might have been expected to have cherished the ideal till actual experiment revealed these incommensurable factors. With their conception of the state as an etre moral collectif, with their recognition of law as the sum of the spiritual limits of the people, with the favourable support of the consensus mundi which Aristotle never opposed, everything seemed opportune for its realization. But just as a good man is crushed by a bad environment, so a social theory must wither in an unresponsive age. Eugenics is dependent upon the ethical perspective; the philosophy of egotism -- le culte de soi-meme -- finds no appeal in a theory which looks beyond the pleasure of the individual to the interests of the future race.

From Socrates to Aristotle philosophy has striven to stem the current of political dissolution, and in philosophy we see an insurgent pessimism, an evergrowing prominence assigned to the theoretic life. The supremacy of Macedon signalized the final breakdown of Greek civilization. Aristotle, standing on the border-line, found in classic antiquity an influence sufficiently strong to place the community in the foreground as compared with the individual.

After Aristotle, the tendency, which had already been at work among the philosophers of the Academy and the Peripatetics, completely reversed the position. Turning aside from the ideal of man as an organic member of society, philosophy concerned itself instead with the satisfaction of the ideas of the individual.

In place of their old dead principles men required new guides: they sought and found these in two directions -- in Orientalism and philosophy. From Orientalism they learnt to profess complete detachment from an ephemeral world of sordid corporeal change, to contemn women and offspring, to throw aside costume, cleanliness, and all the customary decencies of life: Karma will soon be exhausted, Nirvana attained. No theory of racial regeneration can flourish in such an atmosphere of inconsequent egotism.

Epicureanism, with its watchword of "seclusion," teaching its disciples to forego marriage and the rearing of children, can have had no place for eugenics. Equally opposed is the tendency of Stoicism, which "draws such a sharp distinction between what is without and what is within that it regards the latter as alone essential, the former as altogether indifferent, which attaches no value to anything except virtuous intention, and places the highest value in being independent of everything."

Such a system is not likely to concern itself with the interests of a state in which the mass of men are fools, and denied every healthy endeavor. It is true that besides this tendency toward individual independence there was a logical development of Stoicism which recognized that man, to obtain his freedom, must live, not for himself, but for society. But it was the earlier end that continued to predominate, bringing Stoicism nearer and nearer to the selfish egotism of Epicurus. It is only in a community of wise ones that a man will marry or beget children. A generation imbued with such philosophies would have as little thought of racial improvement as an age which found its guidance in the teachings of Schopenhauer and Hartmann.

Moreover, cosmopolitanism, consequent on the dissolution of the city state, not only brought individualism in its train, but let loose the inveterate pessimism of the ancients. So long as the city state existed, the Greeks, forgetful of the Golden Age in the past and the inevitable cataclysm in the future, concerned themselves with the future progress of a limited race. But pessimism, linked with individualism, became a living force in a despairing age, which had never developed the evolutionary conceptions of Anaximander. The creed of a warrior caste, even in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, had never lost its aristocratic character, and when this spirit gave way before the cosmopolitanism and individualism of subsequent philosophy, directing human values away from an evolutionary worldview, the eugenic ideal died and remained lost for centuries. Neither the future nor the past mattered to men whose creed was selfish individualism, but only the present. Extreme individualism, and a new religion that represented human affairs as being the will of God, were the two influences which effectually thwarted the further growth, and indeed the very survival of, classical eugenic thought.

Sources:

Roper, Allen G. Ancient Eugenics< The Arnold Prize Essay, 1913 Oxford. 

That which is above is like unto that which is below