46

and to another, rather older, to recover the maps used by Herodotus, and the methods used in constructing them, from indications betrayed in his book.40 For I want, next, to take up another point of terminology, common, like the last, to physics and to politics, in which we can see something of the next subsequent stage in the physicist's analysis of nature.

̓Αρχὴ AND Τέλος

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Summarizing the conclusions of the old Ionic "physiologists, later writers were accustomed to use the words αρχὴ apyn and apxai, usually translated "causes or origins," to denote that element or elements which they severally thought to be the material basis of things. Thus Archelaus is described as follows: "In the coming into being of the world and generally he tries to contribute something of his own, but he offers the same elements as Anaxagoras. This word ȧpxǹ, like the word vópos (usually translated law or custom), is common to physics and to politics; and it is important that we should realize how closely alike are its uses in these two departments. The word stands at first sight for an abstraction, like Síkn (usually translated "justice") in the vocabulary of Heraclitus; but when we look into its usages, I think we see something more.

In Greek, its cognate verb apxw has the simple sense of causative initiation, and this underlies all the derivative meanings.48 It is also used absolutely." But just as it is possible "to start a dance,''50 so also can you start a person

46 Geographical Journal, Vol. VIII.

47 ἐν μὲν τῇ γενέσει τοῦ κόσμου καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις πειρᾶταί τι φέρειν ἴδιον, τὰς ἀρχὰς δὲ τὰς ἰδίας δίδωσιν ὥσπερ Αναξαγόρας.

48 Homeric passages alone are above suspicion of being influenced by Ionian usage: and with Professor Murray perhaps even these would not pass as prior. ἦρχε θεοῖς δαιτὸς, 11. XV 93. ἦρχεν ὁδοῦ τινι, Od. VIII 107 side by side with pxev odoû, II. III 447 and aрxere popéeɩv Od. XXII 437 are typical and are supported in Attic Greek by legal phrases like ἄρχειν χειρῶν.

doing something.51 Here the act which is initiated is the act of another; but in äpxoμai, "I start myself," which is common both with verbal and with substantival objects, the initiative is my own: I set myself going.52

Similarly, the substantive ȧpxǹ itself, in Homer, has uniformly the sense (common also later) of initiative.53 In a political sense it is not used in Homer; but seeing how personal all human initiative is in Homeric society, this need not surprise us. In historic Greece, ȧpxǹ never, so far as I know, denotes primacy in rank or status, as the older dictionaries suggest, any more than does its correlative τέλος, as in the phrases τέλος ἔχειν Thuc. IV, 118 or oi páλioтa év Téλei Thuc. I, 10. It always has its proper verbal sense of initiative or "beginning," just as Téλos, usually translated "end," has its proper sense of completion insured. The two words are in fact the real complement of each other: they stand correlated, as imperium stands in Latin to provincia. The Roman imperator is he whose function it is to "have things ready" for the occasion which shall arise: his provincia denotes the tether -it is a fine old barnyard word-by which his freedom of action is defined: beyond it, he may bark, but he cannot bite you. In Greek it is exactly the same. Every ȧpxǹ or initiative stands correlated with some Téλos or accomplishment. In the political sphere, the man whose function it is to initiate, to set things going, is in the strict sense himself an apxǹ: and that kind of a man is "dominant,

54

1955

51 ἄρχειν τινός. There are two other constructions, the formula avopaσiv hpfa, Od. XIV 230, Il. II 805, is the counterpart of hoxe Deoîs δαιτός, only with the object unexpressed: compare ἦρχε Μυρμιδόνεσσι μάχεσθαι, Ι1. XVI 65.

52 ἤρξαντο οἰκοδομεῖν, Thuc. I. 107; ἡ ψυχὴ ἄρχεται ἀπολίπουσα. Xen. Cyr. VIII, vii, 26 are the dictionary examples of these: see also Jelf, Greek Grammar 688.

53 Thus we have åpxǹ velkeos, pórov, the beginning (cause) of a quarrel, a murder.

54 où yаρ VπEрßhσeтaι тà μéтpа, as Heraclitus would say; within it, you interfere with him at your peril: the Aikŋs éπíkovρoɩ, his quaestores will find you out.

55 ἀρχικός.

66

as in the Aristotelian phrase about the father's dominion' over his children.56 It is his to take the first step; if he does so, the others cannot but follow, and if the rest follow, the thing is done; and that in Greek is Téλos, "accomplishment." This particular man may, or may not, be competent to initiate wisely, and it is in this sense that initiative will reveal the man;57 for a man who is "dominant" has that written in his heart which Heraclitus knew as a “judgment of behavior," and in this sense you will find the Greek proverb set out on Camber Libraries at Winchester to translate the Founder's motto, Manners Makyth Man.

It is said to have been Thales, who, turning from politics to physics, laid the foundations of a Doctrine of Causation, when he applied the current term for political authority, the expression of potestas or lawful initiative, to describe that factor in external nature which he was led by his observations to regard as the initiative or spontaneous source of change. As Thales knew, and as Aristotle explained of him, seeds, bulbs, and corms, in rich soil, under genial sunshine, lie lifeless still unless water is supplied. We whose scholarship was bred up on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, who enjoy wet weather and garden weeds at all seasons, and whose cycle of vegetable life begins with the "turn of the year" and the first dry days of fitful sunshine, may easily be forgiven if we have failed to realize what an ȧpy, in literal truth, are the first autumn showers in Greece. Water, there, after the long summer drought starts growing things on their growths:58 and with frogspawn, and all insect larvae, it is the same; and in the lowlier forms of life, too, all processes of change and decay follow the same μérpa: in drought they are inhibited; with the renewal of moisture they begin inevitably and in Ionian Greece there were no antiseptics yet. The correlative conception of the Téλos, or "end," in Greek science,

results no less directly from the Shepherd's Calendar than from the slang of the Treasury, and the Statesman's Year Book. For the farmer, Téλos or "end" is alike the boundary of his field, and the profits of his year's work: for the tax-gatherer, it is alike the property to be taxed, and the limit beyond which taxation and all dues become extortionate for the statesman, it is the daily round of duty to be done, and the completed outcome of administrationthe drilled battalion, or the squadron of ships ready to take the sea. Thus if it be true that "initiative reveals the man," no less was it in the spirit of Ionian physicism that Solon the economist advises Croesus to look to the conclusion of every matter:59 for "the end reveals the man" no less. And if the word réλos does not figure conspicuously in the vocabulary of the Ionian physiologists, being mainly replaced by terms like μérpa and púσis, it has adequate compensation later in the teleology of Aristotle.

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Once again it would be pleasant to illustrate in detail other attempts to determine apxal besides that of Thales. But in brief space it is only possible to trace outlines broadly; and I go on to another great pair of antithetical terms, which have a curious and rather perplexing history.

Νόμος IN RELATION TO Φύσις

After collection and classification-which as we now see is the same thing as arranging things in accordance with their respective initiative62-I come to generalization. And here we confront the question of the meaning of vóμos, in relation to that of púois, and the development, in the physical philosophy, of the conception which we call Natural Law. In the mind of Heraclitus, as we have seen, the proper study of the physicist is púois, "the way things grow," and the "way things grow" seen (in the scientific 59 τὴν τελευτὴν παντὸς χρήματος ὁρᾶν.

60 τέλος ἄνδρα δείξει.

61 διαιρέων κατὰ φύσιν.

62 κατ ̓ ἀρχάς.

imagination of the purukos) as the things themselves, if animate and intelligent, might be conceived to see it, is a yváμŋ, a rational common-sense "policy": such as keeps the pvoukós himself out of the way of the "police'' in his own life's daily round. Now when a man like Solon comes, distinguishing people as society in accordance with the way in which men grow, normally and without disproportionthose yváμai-or acts of judgment-which keep men out of the clutches of the Avengers, find their formulation in vóμoi; and, once again, political and moral discourse came to the rescue of natural history, and provided the appropriate word, for the students of the "way things grow.' Fortunately we know a good deal more of the history and growth of Greek public law than we do of Greek science, at least until a much later stage of its development; and it is in its legal usage that we can trace most clearly the way in which the word vópos comes to have its later and specific meanings.

In the political talk of later fifth century vópos is usually translated "law" or "convention," and is familiar to us as the very antithesis of púois, "the way things grow," just as it is the antithesis likewise of "actuality," epyov; but in the earlier phases it was not so; and in the earliest, it simply is the puois or the epyov of whatever thing we are studying, reduced to a description in words. Etymologically, like its twin-brother voμós (with the accent on the last syllable, or "oxytone"), it is a substantival cognate of the Greek verb véμw, which has a primary sense of "tending" a flock, so that it expatiates freely over its proper pasture, and does not stray beyond it, but eats therein what is good for it.4 vouòs oxytone, is the flock or the pasture; the μérpa which the flock does not overstep;65 and ó voμás is the herdsman. Nóuos paroxytone, with the accent thrown forward, is pasture, in the verbal sense of the Latin

63 Ερινύες, Δίκης ἐπίκουροι.

64 καὶ ὅτε καὶ ὡς ἂν τὸ φρόνιμον πρόβατον φάγοι.

65 γνώμῃ τῇ τοῦ νομάδος.