EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY
Developmental, “progressivist,” or evolutionary anthropology has its roots in the ancient classical tradition, in particular the Epicurean account of cultural development best exemplified by Lucretius. For the Epicureans, “the earliest condition of men resembled that of the beasts, and from this primitive and miserable condition they laboriously reached the existing state of civilization, not by external guidance as a consequence of some initial design, but simply by the exercise of human intelligence throughout a long period.”5 It is the notion of man’s independent progress, as opposed to an externally induced kind, that would distinguish ancient progressivism, along with its medieval and modern descendants, from competing theories stressing the role of environmental, external factors in the formation of cultures such as ancient climaticism or modern diffusionism.
Many twelfth-century European writers were intimately familiar with the classical anthropological tradition, with lasting and profound impact on their perceptions and constructions of civilizational norms, achievement, and backwardness in the unfamiliar worlds they recorded around them. William of Malmesbury, who has been credited with being the first to rediscover the classical notion of barbarians and apply it to the Celts of his day, had an extensive knowledge of classical literature,6 as did the Paris-schooled Gerald of Wales. Without pursuing the question of specific influence in particular texts, scholars of the Celtic fringe such as John Gillingham, R. R. Davies, and Robert Bartlett each acknowledge a general classical influence on the medieval ethnographers they treat. A consideration of the impact of Cicero on medieval ethnographic writers goes a long way toward closing this critical gap; for here is a classical author whose ideas about savagery “pervaded the medieval concept of barbarism.”7 We know, for instance, that Cicero, along with Seneca, another writer with progressivist leanings, is among the most cited of the prose writers in Gerald’s numerous works,8 and William of Malmesbury may have had as many as twenty-eight works by Cicero, his most esteemed classical author.9 In reading such works as Cicero’s Pro Sestio, Gerald and other medieval observers of “alien” cultural practices gained access to a mode of cultural analysis that converted these practices into signs of cultural primitivism and allowed them to plot cultures on an evolutionary scale that left no doubt as to the more advanced standing of Anglo-Norman culture.
Cicero was by no means the only source of classical ideas of culture available to writers like Gerald and William of Malmesbury: fragments of the picture of evolutionary cultural development were available via ethnographic descriptions in other classical sources, descriptions that implied developmental models of culture without, however, overtly stating these assumptions as a theory or generalization regarding human culture. We find such ethnographic descriptions in two of Gerald’s known sources, Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum and Sallust’s Bellum Iugurthinum. Moments in these texts look much like those of Gerald and his contemporaries’ descriptions of Celtic peoples. Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum, for instance, notes the warlike aspect of the Germanic Suebi, their preference for milk and meat rather than corn, and sparsely populated lands (4.1–4); the Germans’ lack of agriculture, and beast-filled forests; and the Gauls’ capricious nature (4.5).10 Sallust depicts the ancient Gaetulians and Libyans in a familiar language of savagery: a “rude and uncivilized folk [asperi incultique], who fed like beasts [pecoribus] on the flesh of wild animals and the fruit of the earth … governed neither by institutions nor law, nor were they subject to anyone’s rule. A restless, roving people, they had their abodes wherever night compelled a halt.”11
Ethnographers like Caesar provided medieval writers with a glimpse of classical progressivist ideas, but it is through Cicero’s rendering of Lucretius,12 the earliest Roman exponent of progressivist anthropology and probably its most thorough exponent, that medieval thinkers were able to view a coherent picture of classical ideas of cultural progress, ideas that figure foundationally in the evolutionary anthropology of the nineteenth century and hence in the anthropological discipline at its origins. Lucretius’s De rerum natura, book 5, along with Plato’s Laws, book 3, is widely considered the locus classicus of the developmental anthropological tradition.13 Roughly sketched, Lucretius’s account of man’s cultural development proceeds from the earliest phases in human history where man knew no agricultural tools and lived in the woods, forests, and caves, to the beginnings of human society where men made huts and tents, and “woman in mating with man gave herself to one only.”14 Next came language, the learning of various arts including fire and cooking, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals, and the earliest form of government, chiefdoms. Later kings founded cities, fortified them, and divided property between men. Next there came the reign of law, “for mankind, weary of violence, was grown weak from its feuds, so that it was the more ready of its own accord to subject itself to the restraint of laws.”15 Lucretius’s account is not unmixed with moments of primitivist or antiprogressive nostalgia for times simpler and happier than the present, as when he regrets the invention of private property, or the ravaging advances in techniques of warfare. But his delight in the advancement of human arts and industries in such passages as below is clear: “Navigation and agriculture, fortification and laws, arms, roads, clothing, and all else of this kind, all the prizes of life and its deepest delights also, poetry and pictures and sculpture, these slowly, step by step, were taught by practice and the experience of man’s mind as it progressed [progredientis]. Thus by degrees time draws forth everything before us and reason raises it to the realm of light. For things must be brought to light one after another and in due order in the arts, until they have reached their highest point.”16 This passage not only provides the first use of the word progredientes, from which “progress” derives, but also on the basis of its content and meaning, “[it] could be inserted aptly into literally dozens of works on the progress of mankind written in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century.”17
We find much the same picture in Cicero, who was “intimately acquainted from the beginning of his literary career with Lucretius’ outline of man’s cultural history,” but who, unlike Lucretius, was well known to twelfth-century medieval authors.18 In the De Officiis, so frequently drawn from in Gerald’s writings, Cicero praises the arts in a passage much like Lucretius’s above:
Why should I recount the multitude of arts, without which life would be a thing of no value? For how would the sick be healed, what pleasure would there be in health, how should we obtain either the necessaries or the refinements of life, if there were not so many arts to minister to us? In all these respects the civilized life [exculta vita] of men is far removed from the level of subsistence and comfort of the animals. And without the association of men, cities could neither have been built nor peopled, as a result of which laws and customs [leges moresque] were established, and then the equitable determination of rights [iuris], and a settled disciplined life [certaque vivendi disciplina]. When these were assured there followed a more humane spirit [mansuetudo animorum] and the sense of what is morally becoming, so that life is more secure, and that, by giving and receiving, by mutual exchange of goods and services [mutuandisque facultatibus et commodandis], we were able to satisfy all our needs.19
On the one hand, the arts are the key to the civilized life, provisioning man with necessities and refinements both; on the other, it is the social life of humans that has engendered their cities, the establishment of their laws, the growth of an exchange economy, a more stable, settled existence, and the growth of their civility and morality—the causes of the development of human civilization are multipronged and plentiful according to this optimistic passage. Cicero’s use of mansuetudo for civility is echoed in medieval Latin sources.20 In the Pro Sestio, also available to Gerald, Cicero lays out his clearest expression of the classical developmental model:
For who does not know the condition of nature to have been once such that men, in the days before either natural or civil law