ABSTRACT
It is a sad paradox that what seems to have been a central theme, or the central theme, in the historical anthropology of early and classical Greece survives only in accounts that are either brief, or lacunose, or diluted. The objection is only half true. Aristotle did indeed collect a great deal of material we should now call historical anthropology, as distinct from history political and constitutional, notably in his Nomima Barbarika. Dicaearchus now makes an easy transition from a lack of toil to a lack of disease. His argument, if Porphyry reports him correctly, is again inferential. But so far as we can tell, the material remained raw: it was not systematically exploited to produce a connected and principled anthropology, either progressivist or primitivist or some mixture, from earliest times to his own day. Yet some historical reference is perhaps implicit in his account; for “response to necessity” is of course a key concept in progressivist historical anthropology.
