Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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example, in Diodorus Siculus’s own narrative of early human history (1.8), and other times as decline, as in Hesiod’s famous series of Golden, Silver, and other generations (WD, 109–201). Hesiod does not characterize these types of human beings only by their “way of life” (bios), but bios plays an important role in demarcating especially the deep past inhabited by the Golden generation and the Iron generation, to which Hesiod belongs. The importance of bios is confirmed by the opening of the poem, in which Hesiod describes what life was like before and after Prometheus’s crime as the difference between humans having a secure bios and then losing it (42–93).
Hesiod’s narrative did not belong to a defined genre in antiquity but has been called “historical anthropology” or “cultural history” by modern scholars.35 Cultural history begins with Homer, Hesiod, and the pre-Socratics and culminates in the now lost treatises by Democritus and Dicaearchus.36 Ancient Greek cultural histories do not derive from systematic study, although they may contain genuine, culturally transmitted memories of previous centuries; rather, this mode of historical writing is a hybrid of history and philosophy, an imaginative extrapolation from what little can be securely known about humans’ deepest past.
Other writers use bios to think about different economies that operated on the earth simultaneously. Aristotle’s Politics, for example, describes distinct bioi of pastoralism, hunting and fishing, and raiding (1256a–b).37 Just as there are carnivores and herbivores among the earth’s animals, Aristotle says, so too do human ethnic communities (ethnē) vary in their mode of subsistence. Although Aristotle does not present the bioi of others as developmental stages, his schema offers his student, Dicaearchus of Messana, a base for articulating three stages of human development in his lost third-century BCE Life of Greece. Through quotations in later authors, we know that Dicaearchus read Hesiod’s Works and Days and blended Hesiod’s generations with Aristotle’s economies, describing human change as a progression from a golden age of gathering, to an intermediate stage of pastoralism, to a final stage of agriculturalism.38
As the influence of Aristotle’s ethnic bioi on Dicaearchus’s temporal bioi makes clear, cultural history and ethnography were related and mutually influential ways of understanding environmental culture. But Greek writers were combining ethnic and temporal thinking even before Dicaearchus. The “comparative method,” as it is known in anthropology, allowed Greek writers to compare living peoples to the Greeks’ own early history.39 Thucydides, for example, says that “there are many . . . respects in which a striking resemblance might appear between the old Greek way of life and present barbarian practice.”40 Plato notes that earlier forms of government are preserved in other parts of the world (Leg. 680b), and Arrian (writing after Dicaearchus) compares early Indians to living Scythians through their shared way of life:
πάλαι μὲν δὴ νομάδας εἶναι ᾽Ινδοὺς καθάπερ Σκυθέων τοὺς οὐκ ἀροτῆρας, οἳ ἐπὶ τῆισιν ἁμάξηισι πλανώμενοι ἄλλοτε ἄλλην τῆς Σκυθίης ἀμείβουσιν, οὐτε πόληας οἰκέοντες οὐτε ἱερὰ θεῶν σέβοντες·.
Long ago the Indians were nomadic, just like the nonfarming Scythians, who wander in their wagons and exchange one part of Scythia for another, neither dwelling in cities nor revering the temples of the gods. (Arr., Ind. 7.2–4)
Other texts compare older Greek to current non-Greek customs, including attitudes toward nakedness (Pl., Rep. 452c), religion (Pl., Crat. 397d), linguistics (Crat. 421d), and military practice (Ar. fr. 160).41 Plato, for example, says that “not too long ago it seemed embarrassing and ridiculous, as it seems to many barbarians now, for men to be seen naked.”42
Herodotus does not state the comparative method explicitly, but Tim Rood has argued that the Histories contain close parallels to the passage of Thucydides I have quoted here (1.6.6).43 Herodotus relates past Greek and current non-Greek writing habits, for example:
Καὶ τὰς βύβλους διφθέρας καλέουσι ἀπὸ τοῦ παλαιοῦ οἱ Ἴωνες, ὅτι κοτὲ ἐν σπάνι βύβλων ἐχρέωντο διφθέρῃσι αἰγέῃσί τε καὶ οἰέῃσι· ἔτι δὲ καὶ τὸ κατ’ ἐμὲ πολλοὶ τῶν βαρβάρων ἐς τοιαύτας διφθέρας γράφουσι.
The Ionians call papyrus sheets skins, as they have done from antiquity, because at that time they used to use goat and sheep skins for want of papyrus. And many barbarians write on such skins even today. (Hdt. 5.58.3)
Whether or not one agrees with Rood that this passage fully employs the comparative method, it shows how Greek writers associate distant times and distant places, an association that goes back at least as far as Hesiod, who places the remnant of an older version of humanity at the edges of the earth (WD, 168).44 Herodotus, scholars have noted, imagines distant peoples occupying a blessed, golden-age existence very similar to that enjoyed by Hesiod’s Golden generation. The Ethiopians, for example, who occupy “the ends of the earth” (ta eschata gēs, 3.25.5) and eat milk and meat rather than bread, are tall and beautiful, scrupulous, and long-lived, and they despise luxury (3.20–23).45
Herodotus’s engagement with the emerging discipline of cultural history is more significant than has been recognized.46 Like ancient cultural historians who describe the stages of Greek prehistory in terms of a series of bioi, Herodotus often characterizes ethnic others by their “method of subsistence,” their diaita. Of the Persians who did not join Cyrus he says “all [are] tillers of the soil [arotēres],” except “the Dai, the Mardi, the Dropici, the Sagartii, all wandering herdsmen [nomades]” (1.125).47 This attention to diaita (a synonym of bios) places Herodotus in a larger conversation about the relationship between subsistence, ethnicity, and development over time, a conversation that produced full articulations of the comparative method in the authors who immediately followed Herodotus, including Thucydides and Plato, and cultural histories in the generation after him. Although Herodotus has been seen as just another writer, like Hesiod, who associated Greek past and non-Greek present, the Histories were instead a bridge between archaic correlations of time and place and late classical applications of this correlation to the study of the distant past.48 Herodotus may or may not have aimed to theorize the Greek past through the non-Greek present, but his text was available for Greek readers to interpret this way and for cultural historians after him to draw upon.
Irvin Schick uses the phrase “technology of place” to “describe the discursive instruments and strategies by means of which space is constituted as place, that is place as socially constructed and reconstructed.”49 Bios is a technology of both place and time, a way of constructing time and place that relates them to one another. By mapping bioi, Greek ethnographers explored the past through the world and the world through their understanding of the past. Bioi are also a technology of spatiotemporal difference, a way of creating and marking the difference between past and present, Greek and non-Greek, and within non-Greek communities. Although it is difficult to track lines of influence between cultural history and ethnography, I suspect that it would be most accurate to say that Greek ethnography and cultural history, Greek thinking about distant places and distant times, formed one another in the classical period, eventually merging in the universal history of the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods.50
One of these universal histories was Diodorus Siculus’s Library, which begins with a cultural history (Sic. 1.8) believed to have been broadly influenced by Dicaearchus’s lost Life of Greece, perhaps via Agatharchides, who wrote in Alexandria in the second century BCE.51 According to Diodorus, the first human beings:
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