‘A Book to Keep’

Extract

If what I am giving you this afternoon is little more than a series of rather conjectural reflections about well-known matters, my excuse is that I was tempted by an invitation from an old and highly valued pupil to speak in memory of an intimate companion of the distant days when I was young, a companion from whom I learnt much. Marett, like Frazer and Jane Harrison and others, used his knowledge of Greek as a bridge towards the study of anthropology in general. It is a specially helpful bridge, because the Greeks, with their extraordinary command of literary expression, have left articulate evidence about their thought and feelings and customs at a stage of development when other peoples had no literature. One is always surprised at the coexistence in Greece of the highly developed and the utterly primitive. Dr. Galton in a speculative guess at the intelligence quota of different human groups put the fifth-century Athenian about twice as high as the nineteenth-century Londoner; yet an Athenian army was reduced to terror by an eclipse of the moon, contemporaries of Thucydides worshipped at the Diasia an imaginary enormous snake, and while Aristotle was writing his treatise on dramatic poetry some of his contemporaries were introducing Ludi Scenici to Rome as a medicine against a pestilence.