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Thread ID: 6840 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2003-05-21
2003-05-21 18:20 | User Profile
Greece
War and the Breed: The Relation of War to the Downfall of Nations, by David Starr Jordan. Washington, DC: The Cliveden Press, 1981, pp. 87-92)
**Once Greece led the world in intellectual pursuits, in art, in poetry, in philosophy. A large and vital part of European culture is rooted directly in the language and thought of Athens. The most beautiful edifice in the world was the Peace Palace of the Parthenon, erected by Pericles, to celebrate the end of Greece's suicidal wars. This endured 2,187 years, to be wrecked at last (1687) in Turkish hands by the Christian bombs of the Venetian Republic.
But the glory of Greece had passed away long before the fall of the Parthenon. Its cause was the one cause of all such downfalls--the extinction of strong men by war. At the best, the civilization of Greece was built on slavery, one freeman to ten slaves. And when the freemen were destroyed, the slaves, an original Mediterranean stock, overspread the territory of Hellas along with the Bulgarians, Albanians and Vlachs, barbarians crowding down from the north.
The Grecian language still lives, the tongue of a spirited and rising modern people. But the Greeks of the classic period--the Hellenes of literature, art and philosophy-- will never be known again. "Most of the old Greek race," says Mr. W.H. Ireland, "has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed, there is a strong ground for the statement that there was more of the old heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George." The modern Greek has been called a "Byzantinized Slav." King George himself and Constantine his son are only aliens placed on the Grecian throne to suit the convenience of outer powers, being in fact descendants of tribes which to the ancient Greeks were merely barbarians.
It is maintained that "the modern Greeks are in the main descendants of the population that inhabited Greece in the earlier centuries of Byzantine rule. Owing to the operation of various causes, historical, social and economic, that population was composed of many heterogeneous elements and represented in very limited degree the race which repulsed the Persians and built the Parthenon. The internecine conflicts of the Greek communities, wars with foreign powers, and the deadly struggles of factions in the various cities had to a large, extent obliterated the old race of free citizens by the beginning of the Roman period. The extermination of the Plataeans by the Spartans and of the Melians by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War, the proscription of the Athenian citizens after the war, the massacre of the Corcyrean oligarchs by the democratic party, the slaughter of the Thebans by Alexander and of the Corinthians by Mummius are among the more familiar instances of the catastrophes which overtook the civic element in the Greek cities. The void can only have been filled from the ranks of the metics or resident aliens and of the descendants of the far more numerous slave population. In the classic period four-fifths of the population of Attica were slaves; of the remainder, half were metics. In 100 A.D. only three thousand free arm-bearing men were in Greece." (James D. Bourchier.)
"The constant little struggles of the Greeks among themselves made no great showing as to numbers compared to other wars, but they wiped out the most valuable people, the best blood, the most promising heredity on Earth. This cost the world more than the milling of millions of barbarians. In two centuries there were born under the shadow of the Parthenon more men of genius than the Roman Empire had in its whole existence. Yet this empire included all the civilized world, even Greece herself." (La Pouge.)
The downfall of Greece, [1] like that of Rome, has been ascribed by Schultz to the crossing of the Greeks with the barbaric races which flocked into Hellas from every side. These resident aliens, or metics, steadily increased in number as the free Greeks disappeared. Selected slaves or helots were then made free in order to furnish fighting men, and again as these fell their places were taken by immigrants.
It is doubtless true at this day that "no race inhabits Greece," and the main difference between Greeks and other Balkan peoples is that, inhabiting the mountains and valleys of Hellas they speak in dialects to the ancient tongue. Environment, except through selection and segregation, cannot alter race inheritance and the modern "Greeks" have not been changed by it. In other words, it is quite true that the Greece of Pericles owed its strength to Greek blood, not to Hellenic scenery. When all the good Greek blood was spent in suicidal war, only slaves and foreign-born were left. "'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more." [2]
Furthermore we do not know that even the first Hellenes of Mycenae were an unmixed race, or that any unmixed races ever rose to such prominence as to command the world's attention. We do know that when war depletes a nation slaves and foreigners come in to fill the vacuum, and that the decline of a great race in history has always been accompanied by a debasing of its blood.
Yet out of this decadence natural selection may in time bring forward better strains, and with normal conditions of security and peace, nature may begin again her work of recuperation.
In the fall of Greece we have another count against war, scarcely realized until the facts of Louvain and Malines, of Rheims and Ypres have brought it again so vividly before us. War respects nothing, while the human soul increasingly demands veneration for its own noble and beautiful achievements. As I write this, there rise before me the paintings in the "Neue Pinakothek" at Munich, representing the twenty-one cities of Ancient Greece, from Sparta to Salamis, from Eleusis to Corinth, not as they were, "in the glory which was Greece," not as they are now, largely fishing hamlets by the blue Aegean Sea, but as ruined arches and broken columns half hid in the ashes of war, wars which blotted out Greece from world history.
"Such are the sights, the sorrows fell, About our hearth--and worse, whereof I may not tell. But all the wide town o'er, Each home that sent its master far away From Hellas' shore, Feels the keen thrill of heart, the pang of loss, to-day. For, truth to say, The touch of bitter death is manifold. Familiar was each face, and dear as life, That went into the war, But thither, whence a warrior went of old, Doth naught return-- Only a spear and sword, and ashes in an urn. For Ares, lord of strife, Who doth the swaying scales of battle hold, War's money-changer, giving dust for gold, Sends back, to hearts that held them dear, Scant ashes of warriors, wept with many a tear, Light to the hand but heavy to the soul; Yea, fills the light urn full With what survived the flame-- Death's dusty measure of a hero's fame." [3]
[1] Certain recent writers who find in environment the causes of the rise and fall of nations, ascribe the failure of Greece to the introduction in Athens and Sparta of the malaria-bearing mosquito. As to the facts in question we have little evidence. But while the prevalence of malaria may have affected the general activity of the people, it could in no way have obliterated the mental leadership which made the strength of classic Hellas, nor could it have injected its poison into the stream of Greek heredity.
[2] In contrasting a new race with the old--as the modern Greeks with the incomparable Hellenes--we must not be unjust to the men to today whose limitations are evident, contrasted with a race we know mainly by its finest examples. In spite of poverty, touchiness and vanity characteristic of the modern Greek, there is good stuff in him. He is frank, hopeful, enthusiastic. The mountain Greek, at least, knows the value of freedom, and has more than once put up a brave fight for it.
*The chorus to Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon of .Aeschylus. * (Translated by E.D.A. Morshead.) **
Greece, Part II The Geography of Intellect, by Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan T. Possony. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963, pp. 103-106.
**Genetic Path of Greece
If there are parallel cultural and linguistic influences on Greeks and Jews, there is a sharp contrast in the destinies of these peoples. The genetic path of Greece was one of assimilation and eventual infertility; that of Jewry was one of biological exclusiveness and fecundity. Quite aside from the incalculable influence of Greek thought, the Greeks themselves, the living Greeks, provided intellectual leadership to the Mediterranean world for at least a thousand years after the disaster of the Peloponnesian War. Conquest, biological intermixture, spatial expansion, and selective immigration were among the processes by which Hellenic civilization was carried from Transoxania to Spain.
At the end of this lengthy period of creative leadership, Greek energy was spent, the Greeks themselves were overwhelmed and interbred by successive waves of barbarian peoples. As a result, very little was left of this supremely creative people. The inhabitants of modern Greece do not include many equals of Aristotle and Euripides.
The Greek population never compared in size with that of Persia or Egypt, and one of the astounding achievements of Greece is that so few should have done so much. Classical population estimates are, of course, subject to immense margins of error. Outside of China, the census was virtually unknown. The cumbersome number system of the Greeks made arithmetical computations difficult in the extreme. The fact that the Greek word myrias, meaning ten thousand, became myriad and came to mean any number so large that it could not be counted testified to Greek inability to estimate or manipulate large magnitudes easily.
With these qualifications, a few estimates of the population of the Creek cities can be offered. In 480 B.C., Corinth is believed to have had a population of 50,000 freemen and 60,000 slaves; a century later, the island of Aegina had 30,000 citizens and 470,000 slaves (according to Aristotle); in 431 B.C., Chios claimed 30,000 freemen and 100,000 slaves. Sybaris at the peak of its prosperity may have had 300,000 inhabitants. For Syracuse in Sicily, the population estimate is half a million.
Turning to Athens, the salt of Greece, there were 43,000 citizens in the age of Pericles, 28,500 metics (or resident aliens) and 115,000 slaves. The total population, including women and children, was about 315,000. Approximately a century and a half later, in 310 B.C., Demetrius of Phalerum took a census of the city and counted 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and 400,000 slaves. Total population had more than doubled while the number of freemen had fallen by half. [1]
In Attica, soil erosion had disintegrated the traditional subsistence and diversified farming system as early as the beginning of the 4th century B.C. In the Critias, Plato attributes this process to "violent deluges which stripped off all the rich, soft soil," leaving "a country of skin and bones." Plato noted that the lofty, forested mountains had become so stripped of trees that many were fit only for the cultivation of bees; he added that aridity had set in, for the rainfall glided over the denuded surface, fell to the sea and was lost to agriculture. [2]
The Athenian response to this challenge was an agricultural revolution, based on specialization and production for export. The denuded hills now supported olive trees; the oil pressed from the olives was packed in jars and sent overseas in Attic ships and sold to foreigners by Attic merchants. "Bad harvests due to atmospheric conditions fall with crushing weight upon even the strongest land- powers," wrote an anonymous Athenian economist of the early fifth century B.C., "while sea-powers surmount them easily. Bad harvests are never of world-wide incidence, and therefore the masters of the sea are always able to draw upon regions in which the harvest has been abundant." [3] The anonymous Athenian saw that the wealth of Athens sprang from navigation and trade; her culture, her broad, cosmopolitan view and her exacting standards of aesthetic excellence were stimulated by the fact that her society was maritime and her wealth drawn from the ocean.
The demographic decline of Athens thus was not caused by soil erosion. The impoverishment of the land was, on the contrary, a stimulus, for it prevented Attica from sinking into the bovine, brutish stupidity of a peasant society and forced her to turn to navigation, seaborne trade, agricultural specialisation and the development of great handicraft industries for export.
The decline was caused, to a large extent, by the internecine military struggles between the city-states and by the fact that the citizens fought the wars of their cities instead of pursuing the perhaps wiser Roman policy of hiring barbarians for this purpose. It is generally assumed that the Roman policy was folly because some of the barbarians turned on their masters during the upheavals of the Voelkerwanderungen. Yet it is worth recalling that the Roman Empire in the West persisted for about five centuries and that in the East for 15. The political achievement of Rome, considered in terms of the organization of state power, rather than any actualization of individual freedom, is more impressive than that of Greece.
Depopulation in Greece seems to have been caused by institutional factors and by political and psychic decadence. Polybius describes the process cogently as it operated during the 2nd century B.C. In Boeotia, he observed, "the administration of justice in the country had remained in abeyance over a period of nearly twenty-five years"; civil and criminal law were systematically thwarted by the proclamation of states of siege and by arbitrary executive action; a welfare state was created by politicians who won votes by giving relief to the poor and releasing convicted debtors and criminals. "The effect of these measures was reinforced by another obsession of an unfortunate kind," Polybius added. "Persons dying childless began to abandon the habit which had formerly prevailed in Boeotia of bequeathing their property to their relatives in the next generation, and to spend it instead upon entertainment and drinking, in which they shared it with their friends. Even persons leaving families began, in many cases, to earmark the greater part of their property for legacies to the clubs, until there were many individuals in Boeotia entitled to more free dinners a month than there were days on which to eat them."
The same, or a similar, situation existed elsewhere in Greece. "In our own times," Polybius wrote, "the whole of Hellas has been afflicted with a low birth rate or, in other words, with depopulation, through which the states have been emptied of inhabitants with an accompanying fall of productivity -- and this in spite of the fact that we have not suffered from any continuous wars or epidemics.
"The fact is that the people of Hellas had entered upon the false path of ostentation, avarice, and laziness," the historian continued, "and were therefore becoming unwilling to marry or, if they did marry, to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two, [4] in order to leave them wealthy and to spoil them in their childhood; and in consequence of all this the evil had been spreading rapidly before it was observed. Where there are families of one or two children, of whom war claims one and disease the other for its victim, it is an evident and inevitable consequence that households should be left desolate and that states, precisely like beehives, should gradually lose their reserves and sink into impotence. On this subject there is no need whatsoever to inquire of the gods as to how we are to be saved from the cancer. The plain man will answer that, first and foremost, we must save ourselves, either by changing our obsession or alternately by making it illegal not to bring up every child that is born." [5]
[1] The figures for Athenian population in the Periclean age are from A. W. Gomme, The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B. C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 21, 26, 47; the other estimates were culled from a variety of sources by Will Durant, The Life of Greece ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939), PP. 91-95,150, 160-1, 173, 254-5, 561.
[2] Arnold J. Toynbee (trans.), in A Study of History, op. cit., I, 39.
[3] Toynbee, ibid., I, 41.
[4] This and the concluding sentence are references to infanticide, a practice which was legal in Greece.
[5] Polybius, Book XX, Chapter 6, 1-6 and Book XXXVI, Chapter 7. Arnold J. Toynbee (trans.) in Creek Civilization and Character, op. cit., pp. 72-3. **
Edit: added part II.
2003-05-21 18:28 | User Profile
== The Fall of Rome
War and the Breed: The Relation of War to the Downfall of Nations, by David Starr Jordan. Washington, DC: The Cliveden Press, 1981, pp. 76-87.
**"The human harvest was bad!" Thus the historian sums up the conditions in Rome in the days of the good emperor, Marcus Aurelius. By this he meant that while population and wealth were increasing, manhood had failed. There were men enough in the streets, men enough in the camps, menial laborers enough and idlers enough, but of good soldiers there were too few. For the business of the state, which in those days was mainly war, its men were inadequate.
In recognition of this condition we touch again the overshadowing fact in the history of Europe, the effect of "military selection" on the human breed.
In rapid survey of the evidence brought from history one must paint the picture, such as it is, with a broad brush, not attempting to treat exceptions and qualifications. The evil effects of military selection and its associated influences have long been recognized in theory by certain students of Social Evolution. But the ideas derived from the sane application of our knowledge of Darwinism to history are even now just beginning to penetrate the current literature of war and peace. In public affairs most nations have followed the principle of opportunism, "striking while the iron is hot," without regard to future results, whether of financial exhaustion or of race impoverishment.
The recorded history of Rome begins with small and vigorous tribes inhabiting the flanks of the Apennines and the valleys down to the sea, and blending together to form the Roman republic. They were men of courage and men of action, virile, austere, severe and dominant. [1] For this reason, Rome was long a republic. Free-born men control their own destinies. "The fault," says Cassius, "is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings." Thus in freedom, when Rome was small, without glory, without riches, without colonies and without slaves, she laid the foundations of greatness.
But little by little the spirit of freedom gave way to that of domination. Conscious of power, men sought to exercise it, not on themselves but on one another. Little by little this meant aggression, suppression, plunder, struggle, glory and all that goes with the pomp and circumstance of war. So the individuality in the mass was lost in the aggrandizement of the few. Independence was swallowed up in ambition and patriotism came to have a new meaning, being transferred from hearth and home to the camp and the army.
In the subsequent history of Rome, we have now to consider only a single factor, the "reversal of selection." In Rome's conquests, Vir, the real man, went forth to battle and foreign invasion; Homo, the human being, remained on the farm and in the workshop and begat the new generations. "Vir gave place to Homo,''1 says the Latin author. Men of good stock were replaced by the sons of slaves and camp-followers, the riff-raff of those the army sucked in but could not use.
The Fall of Rome was due not to luxury, effeminacy or corruption, not to Nero's or Caligula's wickedness, not to the futility of Constantine's descendants. It began at Philippi where the spirit of domination overcame the spirit of freedom. It was forecast still earlier in the rise of consuls and triumvirs incident to the thinning out of the sturdy and self-sufficient strains who brooked no arbitrary rule. While the best men were falling in war, civil or foreign or remained behind in far-away colonies, the stock at home went on repeating its weakling parentage. A condition significant in Roman history is marked by the gradual swelling of the mob, with the rise in authority of the Emperor who was the mob's exponent. Increase of arbitrary power went with the growing weakness of the Romans themselves. Always the "Emperor" serves as a sort of historical barometer by which to measure the abasement of the people. The. concentrated power of Julius Caesar, resting on his own tremendous personality, showed that the days of Cincinnatus and of Junius Brutus were past. The strength of Augustus rested likewise in personality. The rising authority of later emperors had its roots in the ineffectiveness of the mob, until it came to pass that "the little linger of Constantine was thicker than the loins of Augustus." This was due not to Constantine's force, but to the continued reversal of selection among the people over whom he ruled. The Emperor, no longer the strong man holding in check all lesser men and organizations, became the creature of the mob; and "the mob, intoxicated with its own work, worshipped him as divine." Doubtless the last emperor, Augustulus Romulus, before the Goths threw him into the scrap-heap of history, was regarded by the mob and himself as the most god-like of the whole succession.
The Romans of the Republic might perhaps have made a history very different. Had they held aloof from world-conquering schemes Rome might have remained a republic, enduring even down to our day. The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood, leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to be fathers of coming generations.
"The Roman Empire," says Professor Seeley, "perished for want of men." Even Julius Caesar notes the dire scarcity of men (deinen oliganthroponian), while at the same time there were people enough. The population steadily grew; Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a certain type were plenty, but self- reliant farmers, "the hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines," men of the early Roman days, these were fast going, and with the change in type of population came the turn in Roman history.
"The mainspring of the Roman army for centuries had been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population that lined the Apennines."
"The effect of the wars was that the ranks of the smaller farmers were decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in the army multiplied," says Professor Bury. Thus "Vir gave place to Homo," thus the mob filled Rome and the mob-hero rose to the imperial throne. No wonder that Constantine seemed greater than Augustus. No wonder that "if Tiberius chastised his subjects with whips, Valentinian chastised them with scorpions." [2]
With Marcus Aurelius and the Antonines came a "period of sterility and barrenness in human beings." Bounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against race-suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge." Wars were conducted in the face of a declining birth-rate, and the decline in quality and quantity in the human breed engaged very early the attention of Roman statesmen. Deficiencies of numbers were made up by immigration, willing or enforced. Failure in quality was beyond remedy.
Says Professor Zumpt: "Government having assumed godhead took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty." "The Emperor possessed in the army an overwhelming force over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism because it had no country, which had no humanity because it had no domestic ties." "There runs through Roman literature a brigand's and barbarian's contempt for honest industry." "Roman civilization was not a creative kind, it was military, that is, destructive."
What was the end of it all? The nation bred Romans no more. To cultivate the Roman fields "whole tribes were borrowed." The man with quick eye and strong arm gave place to the slave, the scullion, the pariah, whose lot is fixed because in him there lies no power to alter it. So at last the Roman world, devoid of power to resist, was overwhelmed by the Ostrogoths. "The barbarian settled and peopled the empire rather than conquered it. It was the weakness of war-worn Rome that gave the Germanic races their first opportunity." "A nation is like a bee," wisely observes Bernard Shaw, "as it stings it dies."
Seeck's Interpretation
In his monumental history of the "Downfall of the Ancient World" (Der Untergang der Antiken Welt), Dr. Otto Seeck of the University of Mà ¸nster in Westphalia treats in detail the causes of such decline. He first calls attention to the intellectual stagnation which came over the Roman Empire about the beginning of the Christian Era. This manifested itself in all fields of intellectual activity. No new idea of any importance was advanced in science nor in technical and political studies. In the realm of Literature and Art also one finds a complete lack of originality and a tendency to imitate older models. All this, Seeck asserts was brought about by the continuous "rooting out ("Austrottung") of the best" [3] through war.
Such extermination which took place in Greece as well as in Rome, was due to persistent internal conflicts, the constant murderous struggle going on between political parties, in which, in rapid succession, first one and then the other was victorious. The custom of the victors being to kill and banish the leaders and all prominent men in the defeated party, often destroying their children as well, it is evident that in time every strain distinguished for moral courage, initiative or intellectual strength was exterminated. By such a systematic killing off of men of initiative and brains, the intellectual level of a nation must necessarily be lowered more and more. [4] In Rome as in Greece, observes Seeck: "A wealth of force of spirit went down in the suicidal wars." "In Rome, Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds and thousands. Sulla destroyed the democrates, and not less thoroughly. Whatever of strong blood survived fell as an offering to the proscription of the Triumvirate." "The Romans had less of spontaneous force to lose than the Greeks. Thus desolation came sooner to them. Whoever was bold enough to rise politically in Rome was almost without exception thrown to the ground. Only cowards remained, and from their blood came forward the new generations. [5] Cowardice showed itself in lack of originality and in slavish following of masters and traditions."
Certain authors, following Varro, have maintained that Rome died a "natural death," the normal result of old age. It is mere fancy to suppose that nations have their birth, their maturity and their decline under an inexorable law like that which determines the life history of the individual. A nation is a body of living men. It may be broken up if wrongly led or attacked by a superior force. When its proportion of men of initiative or character is reduced its future will necessarily be a resultant of the forces that are left.
Dr. Seeck speaks with special scorn of the idea that Rome died of "old age." He also repudiates the theory that her tall was due to the corruption of luxury, neglect of military tactics or over- diffusion of culture.
"It is inconceivable that the mass of Romans suffered from over- culture. [6] In condemning the sinful luxury of wealthy Romans we forget that the trade-lords of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were scarcely inferior in tins regard to Lucullus and Apicius, their waste and luxury not constituting the slightest check to the advance of the nations to which these men belonged. The people who live in luxury in Rome were scattered more thinly than in any modern state of Europe. The masses lived at all times more poorly and frugally because they could do nothing else. Can we conceive that a war-force of untold millions of people is rendered effeminate by the luxury of a few hundreds? . . . Too long have historians looked on the rich and noble as marking the fate of the world. Half the Roman Empire was made up of rough barbarians untouched by Greek or Roman culture..."
"The Niobe of Nations, there she stands, Crownless and childless in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her withered hands, Whose sacred dust was scattered long ago!"
Byron.
(1) Virilis, austerus, severus, dominus, good old words applied by Romans to themselves.
(2) The point of this is that the cruel Tiberius was less severe on the Romans of his day than was the relatively benevolent Valentinian on his decadent people.
(3) "Die Ausrottung der Besten, die jenen schwà  cheren Volken die Vernichtung brachte, hat die starken dermanen erst befà  higt, auf den Trummern der antiken Welt neue dauerende Gemeinschaften zu errichten." (Seeck.)
(4) "The history of Korea reveals much the same condition. Three hundred years ago this country had reached a considerable degree of civilization. Its conquest by Hideyoshi, Shogun of Japan was followed by a vigorous reaction, in which the Japanese armies were flung out of Korea and the Japanese fleet destroyed. At that time in art matters at least, the Koreans were more advanced than the Japanese. The Buddhist temples and the palaces of Kyoto and Nagoya are modeled after similar buildings in Seoul, being, in fact mostly built by Korean artisans.
In modern times, until the country was taken over by Japan the government of Korea was singularly inert and correspondingly cruel, while the people though individually fairly intelligent had come to lose all initiative due to the persistent practice of the rulers of beheading all persons opposed to their policies. Similar customs widely spread in earlier times in Europe as well as in Asia, must have been a large factor in the extirpation of initiative. The old English habit of sending "to the Tower" those lords or ministers the crown found troublesome was another form of the same costly waste of ability from which in ruder times no nation was free.
(5) Author's italics.
(6) "Damitsprechend hat man das Wort 'Ueberkulture' à ¸berhaupt erfunden, als wenn ein zu grosses Mass von Kulture à ¸berhaupt denkbar wà  re."**
==
Roman Demography and Decline
==
**Infanticide, abortion and drastic family limitation are understandable measures in impoverished countries. But this was not the main motive in either Greece or Imperial Rome. Yet in each of these civilizations, the upper classes led the way in a refusal to reproduce. Moreover, wealthy Greeks and Romans spent their accumulated wealth on people and institutions who were not blood relatives: in the Greek case, in legacies to convivial clubs which provided free dinners; in the Roman instance, on sycophants who served and nattered the rich in the expectation of legacies.
The Belgian scholar, Willems, computed that in 179 B.C. there were 88 patricians from 17 gentes in the Roman Senate. Due to the barrenness of the aristocracy, this number had shrunk by 55 B.C. to 43 patrician senators from 12 gentes. As for the Emperors, neither Julius Caesar nor Augustus left a male heir; Tiberius had a son, but he was murdered; Nero and Caligula left no direct heirs; Galba, Otto, Vitellius and Titus produced no children; Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius left no sons. While Marcus Aurelius had a large family, the average Emperor "was either childless or he left only a daughter." [1]
Plautus, writing in the days of the Republic, has one of his characters explain that he can live happily without children, surrounded by attentive friends who are interested only in his money. "Before daybreak they are at the door asking if I have slept well." Pliny the Younger and Juvenal wrote bitterly about an upper class which produced no children, but lived surrounded by obsequious and avaricious flatterers. The exceptions to the general rule of sterility were regarded as remarkable men. Thus, Asinius Rufus, who lived around 100 A.D., was praised for raising children. "Even in this, he acted the part of a good citizen; in that he was willing freely to undertake the responsibilities entailed upon him by the fruitfulness of his wife, in an age when the advantages of childlessness are such that many people regard even one son as a burden. He scorned all these advantages and even became a grandfather." [2]
The adoption mania that prevailed among the Roman upper classes was another aspect of the fashion of childlessness. Most of the Antonines chose their successors in this manner and many members of the upper classes rewarded sycophants in the same fashion. As a rule, the persons adopted were adults. This institution was another aspect of the Graeco-Roman attitude toward children, one which, by our standards, can be described as ranging from indifference to aversion. [3]
Probably, the prevalence of homosexuality was one of the main reasons for Graeco-Roman indifference to children and to familial continuity. This implied a dissociation of the sexual impulse and its emotional concomitants from reproduction. A man whose sexual pleasures were sterile would be unlikely to become attached to his children or to wish to go to the trouble to rear them. Pederasty and sodomy were social evils, in the classical world as elsewhere, primarily because they disrupted the family, the consciousness of biological continuity and, therefore, both the roots of the individual and his sense of civic duty.
The Greek biogenetic debacle was a product of infanticide, abortion, childless marriages, homosexuality, pacifism, wars of conquest, and the destruction of the free citizenry in internecine wars. In the Roman case, the same sexual factors operated, but the upper classes were physically decimated by class wars, proscriptions and political murder rather than in military conflicts between leagues of city- states.
Lead Poisoning and Roman Decline
Since these pages were written, one of the authors has had the privilege of being in correspondence concerning the relation of lead poisoning to the Roman decline, with Dr. S. Colum Gilfillan, associate of the late Ellsworth Huntington and author of the theory of "the coldward course of progress." Dr. Gilfillan advances a highly original explanation of the demographic decadence of the Roman upper classes, one which stresses not withdrawal from reproduction, but involuntary infertility. His argument is briefly that around 150 B.C. Greek cookery was introduced into the homes of the Roman upper classes and simultaneously the rule against women drinking wine was relaxed. The wine had a heavy lead content and Grecian culinary methods involved poisoning of foods with lead. Gilfillan points out that lead in women and children produces sterility, abortion, stillbirths and heavy child mortality.
In support of this theory is the fact that both the course of lead poisoning and the demographic crisis were class-selective. Beginning about 100 B.C., the Roman aristocracy died out with extraordinary rapidity, each generation bringing about a third of its number to adulthood. The chief cause of this decline was small families, though other factors contributed. At the same time, Rome as a whole maintained or increased its total population. This gears in with the theory that the decline was caused by lead poisoning, since Greek cooking methods and wine-drinking by women were introduced into the upper classes only.
Gilfillan suggests further that the biological extermination of the upper classes was one of the primary causes of the extinction of Roman inventiveness and scientific discovery. "When everyone who could make, marry or mate with money went on a lead diet and exterminated his race in a generation or two or three at most," he writes, "we can well imagine what this would do to the native intelligence of the race, first to the patricians and then to the lower ranks, whose ablest or handsomest members were continually promoted to replenish the decimated plutocracy. The diet of the lower Roman classes was not so poisoned, and they maintained the gross population. What happened to ancient culture, especially in art, science, and progressiveness in general, is familiar, and can be verified by Darmstaedter's statistics. His data indicate that the rate of scientific discoveries per century fell to 20 per cent, comparing 500 B.C.-200 A.D, with 201-600 A.D., while the rate for technological developments, depending more on the artisan class, fell to 43 per cent, in spite of population increase (L. Darmstaedter, Handbuch, from P. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, Vol. II, Table 5.)." [4]
Dr. Gilfillan's highly original theory of the biology of Roman decline and fall can be easily related to the subsequent relapse of the Empire into a tradition-bound, arteriosclerotic bureaucracy. It can be argued that every static bureaucracy of status rises on the corpse of a natural aristocracy of intellect which has committed suicide. That is to say, as long as a society contains a powerful element of resourceful, self-reliant and intellectually superior people, it will be able to resist the straitjacket of omnipotent bureaucracy, regardless of whether this appears in the guise of a garrison nation, a welfare state or a communist beehive. A verdict on Dr. Gilfillan's hypothesis concerning the role of lead poisoning must, however, await the publication of his completed research.
The thinning out of Greek stock was partially compensated for by the spatial expansion of Greek culture. The Hellenistic and Roman expansions served to carry Greek and Roman civilization to Asian regions that had heretofore been hierarchic and despotic, and to European and African areas which had previously been barbarian or, at best, only partially civilized. Since neither the Alexandrian nor the Roman Empire considered ethnic origin fundamental, the conquered peoples were absorbed into the new imperial communities and their more promising individuals were often incorporated into the elite elements of the empires.
Perhaps the amazing vitality and durability of Graeco-Roman genius, in the face of biological deterioration caused by the infertility of the freemen, can be explained in terms of the expansion of the area within which elite selection could occur, and the improvement of the mechanisms by which this selection did occur.
Slavery played a constructive role in the renascence of the Roman elite. Hordes of war prisoners were brought to Rome during the periods of imperial vigor and victory. Much of this human material was wasted in the gladiatorial arenas and in sadistic spectacles entailing suffering without combat -- for instance, the use of slaves as torches and the tying of slaves to posts to be eaten by wild beasts. A much greater wastage occurred in the use of slaves on the latifundia under conditions much harsher than those which the Negro ever faced in the American South. [5] Yet the more fortunate and intelligent of them were able to buy their freedom and acquire wealth.
Teaching, philosophy and other free professions were staffed, to a large extent, by Greek slaves and their descendants. Manumitted slaves from the regions which had formed part of the Alexandrian successor states and their descendants became merchants, bankers and powerful administrators of the affairs of the Empire.
The Julian and Claudian houses in particular relied on the emancipated slaves and their descendants to run the Empire. This was an entirely natural decision since, in the transition from aristocracy to despotism, it was politically necessary' to break the power of the patricians. The freedmen were an ideal substitute. Of alien stock and speech and having no social status of their own, they were men whose loyalty could be relied upon since they were unable to become usurpers and too insecure to become traitors.
Thus, conquest had spread the Creek elite over the area conquered by Alexander of Macedon and, several centuries later, slavery served as the vehicle which collected the remnants of the same Greek elite (and of the Hellenized subjects of the Alexandrian Empire) and brought them to Rome to assist in ruling and civilizing a new world order.
The elite of classical Greece was ethnically coherent, that of Imperial Rome cosmopolitan. The Orientalization of the Roman Empire was a movement from contract to status, from individualism to arteriosclerotic collectivism. Alexander Severus (Imp. 222-235) transformed the guilds into closed corporations and destroyed freedom of labor. Under him, the decurionate (where one sen-cd in the colonial senate) became a crushing burden. In the fourth century, the process was further advanced and, as Pareto put it, the burdens of guild membership completely outweighed its privileges. Between the reigns of Theodosius and Honorius (395 to 423 A.D.), guild membership became a form of slavery and those who ran away from the guilds were arrested and brought back.
During these centuries of decline, Rome not only adopted an Oriental religion, but her elite became to a great extent Oriental as well. As this occurred, an aristocratic element was displaced by a bureaucracy of specialists, both in the military and the civilian spheres. "The development may be pictured roughly in these terms," Pareto wrote: "under the Republic obligation of actual military service on the part of members of the elite; in the early years of the Empire, a merely formal obligation, actual service not being forbidden; in the latter periods, complete legal disqualification from actual military service." [6] Arrius Menander added: "For a man to join the army when he has no right to do so is a serious crime . . ." Theodosius and Valentinian ordered that decurions found in the armed forces be returned to civilian life. This was to prevent the decurions or their progeny from "shirking the duty they owe to the country," namely to pay taxes. [7]
It the Creek system of having the freemen kill themselves off in the wars of the city-states was suicidal, the system which prevailed during the last centuries of Roman imperial decline was no less so. It was rational demographic and eugenic policy to have the legions manned by outsiders and barbarians, but it was folly to deter the Roman upper classes from holding the posts of military command.
Toward the fourth century of the Christian era, the Roman Empire in the West disintegrated under the successive shocks of barbarian attack, while that in the East assumed a certain bureaucratic rigor mortis. To paraphrase Pareto again, the army became a horde of riffraff; the elite impotent; the movement within and among classes frozen. The production of wealth dried up because of the enormous fiscal burdens imposed by the state. What had emerged was a frozen system of guilds from which nobody could escape and within which no progress was possible.
A component of this general panorama of social disintegration was a flight from reproduction and a flight from taxes. The spread of monasticism was as rapid and startling as that of Christianity had been, particularly in the mild Egyptian climate where a debased neo- Platonism, which regarded the human body as morally loathsome, held sway. "In 390 there were 5,000 Antonian hermits in Nitria alone; the Pachomian monks of Egypt numbered some 7,000 in all." [8] The idle, masochistic monasticism of the Egyptian Christians ( not to be confused with the working monasticism founded by St. Benedict) was, as the Cambridge Medieval History puts it, the product of Oriental ideas and of "the evils of the times." As to the latter: "It was in the close of the third century that the great impulse to monasticism began, the flight from the evil world, sinful, disordered, unjust, oppressed, extortionately taxed, where a more ordinary life of Christian austerity and renunciation seemed barely practicable." [9]
The monastic flight from family responsibilities, like the earlier homosexual withdrawal from reproduction, was most intense in areas of the Eastern Mediterranean that had formed part of the Hellenistic civilization structure. Monasticism, however, was not the only form which the flight from biological continuity assumed, and in 535 A.D. we find the Emperor Justinian writing the Praetorian Prefect of the East, John, against decurions who sought to avoid death duties which forfeited a fourth of their estate to the Senate. Justinian complained that "they started dissipating their property so as to die in poverty and to leave the Senate not the quarter due to it but a property completely bankrupt; next, having decided to deprive the Senate even of their persons, they formed the most impious plot of all, abstaining from lawful marriage and choosing rather to die childless from the legal point of view than to prove themselves useful to their race and to their Senate." [10]
These factors having contributed to the numerical decline and biogenetic deterioration of the Greeks and the Romans, a succession of barbarian invaders which overran the land and miscegenated with the population did the rest. In the case of Greece, these afflictions spanned the long period from the Voelkerwanderungen of the first centuries of the Christian era to the depredations of the Mongols and Ottoman Turks. The Creeks, at the height of their moral and intellectual powers, had successfully held their peninsula against the Persian horde. It is reasonable to suppose that, had genetic disintegration and adulteration of the Creek elite not occurred, Greece might have disposed of the later waves of barbarian invaders with comparable efficacy.
[1] William Stearns Davis, The Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome (New York: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 296-7.
[2] Quoted by Davis, ibid., p. 306, from an unidentified contemporary source.
[3] Roman attitudes toward children, perhaps at their worst, are illustrated by the episode in Petronius' Satyricon in which the guests amuse themselves by watching the small boy, Gito, deflower the seven-year-old girl, Quartilla.
[4] S. Colum Gilfillan, "The Inventive Lag in Classical Mediterranean Society," Technology and Culture, III, No. 1 (1962), 85-87. In this note, Dr. Gilfillan points out that the Romans put lead into their wine "in as many as seven different ways" since they were unaware that the metal was poison. He cites as references K. B. Hofmann, "Die Getrà  nke der Griechen und der Rà ¡mer vom Hygienischen Standpunkte," Archiv fà ¸r Geschichte der Medizin (1883), 26-40, 269- 289; R. Kobert "Chronische Bleivergiftung im klassischen Altertume," in P. Diergart, cd. Beitrà  ge aus der Geschichte der Chemie (1909).
[5] Cato advised farmers to sell old oxen, old wagons, old tools, old and diseased slaves and everything else that has become useless (De Re Rustica, Chap. 2). In Rome itself, old slaves could not be put to death, but could be exposed on an island in the Tiber to die.
[6] Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (4 vols.; New York: Harcourt, Brace 1935). 2601. (The references are to Pareto's paragraphs, not his pages.)
[7] Ibid., 2550. 2608.
[8] C. W. Prevità ½-Orton, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 74.
[9] Ibid., p. 72.
[10] Percy Neville Ure, Justinian and his Age (London: Penguin, 1951), p. 112. **
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2003-05-21 20:09 | User Profile
I want to make it clear than I don't necessarily agree with all that is written in those excerpts. I merely want to see what others' opinions on the causes of the decline of civilizations are.
2003-05-22 14:11 | User Profile
I'm going to have to get a copy of [u]War and the Breed[/u]. That sounds a lot like what I imagine a future historian might write about the Holy American Empire.
Can't say it leaves me with a great deal of hope, though. If the natural cycle of history is for remnants of free men to gather and create a nation, be great for several generations, and then depopulate their better ranks through war and hop on the dysgenic slip-n-slide--something that seems to have started pretty early in American history--then the trick is simply to be born at a high point of the historical sine wave. History is a vicious cycle, hard to break.
2003-05-23 20:41 | User Profile
Originally posted by AntiYuppie@May 22 2003, 14:55 The article is wrong on a number of facts. Describing modern Greeks as "Byzantine Slavs" only applies to the Macedonian Greeks, who are indeed ethnically identical to the ex-Yugoslav Macedonians. Most Greeks from the lower Peninsula have nothing to do with the Slavs.
I agree. In fact, the word "Slav" is only accurately applied to Russians, Poles Belarussians and Northern Ukrainians, who do in fact derive mostly from the original Slavs, and are Corded Nordic/Baltic by race. Though Southern Slavs share some mitochondrial DNA with the Northern Slavs, most of their genes can be traced to Balkan aborigines. I doubt, for example, that the average Montenegrin has much more Slavic ancestry than the average Greek-the elites of Yugoslavia are Corded Nordics of Slavic derivation, but the brunt of the population is of indigenous origin.
**other hand, modern Greeks appear to be genetically closer to Turks and Palestinian Semites (Lebanese Arabs, Palestinians, and Jews) than they are to any Indo-European group. This is probably due both to Turkic incursions into the Balkans during the Middle Ages, and to much earlier colonization of southern Greece by Phoenecian sailors. **
It is inaccurate to speak of the Greeks of antiquity as a homogenous whole. They were always rigidly stratified into several classes. On top were the aristoi, Corded Nordics of Indo-European ancestry. The helots were at the bottom; they descended from the aborigines of the Balkans, who had Middle-Eastern affinities, and themselves were descended from Middle-Eastern farmers who immigrated to Europe in substamtial numbers during the Neolithic. The modern Greek genepool is at least 60% Middle Eastern-some studies estimate this proportion to be as high as 85%. How much of this is traceable to the Neolithic and how much of it is due to more recent incursions is still an open question.
** so attributing the decline of Classical Greek civilization to purely racial factors is probably misguided.**
I agree. Cultural degeneracy cause the extinction of the most gifted Greek class and ultimately the fall of Greek civilization.
It would be interesting to examine genetic material from bones of the ancient Greeks to determine how much in common they have with modern Greeks, or whether the ancient Greeks were indeed more Indo-European than their modern counterparts. As far as I know, that's an open question.
Most ancient DNA cannot be recovered. since its an extremely fragile chemical. Skeletally, the brunt of the Geek population of today is identical to the brunt of the Greek population of antiquity-however, the Greek arisoi of Indo-European origin, who were always greatly outnumbered by the area's indigenous inhabitiants have disappeared. This, in my opinion is a significant enough change, as the aristoi were responsible for the vast majority of ancient Greek accomplishments.
Link: Are the Greeks "still" Indo-European?
I don't agree with everything on that page though.
2003-05-24 00:42 | User Profile
I merely want to see what others' opinions on the causes of the decline of civilizations are.
There are no new revelations to be had here. I take what I like from Gibbon, Spengler, Yockey and few others. I add observations of the present and apply the whole shebang to try and understand the trajectory our civilization has taken this past century and project into the future. The course seems clear.
On somewhat related matter to the Greek and Slavic questions on this thread, Iââ¬â¢ve been playing with the [url=http://www.racearchives.com/calc/sforza_profiles.asp?popid=4&dbname=sforza26euros]Human Races Calculator[/url] that AY linked to earlier and found some intriguing anomalies. It seems that linguistic similarities are inferior to physical proximity in predicting genetic distances between Europeans. [url=http://www.harazd.net/~nadbuhom/mapy_12.htm]Here's[/url] a cute linguistic map Iââ¬â¢ve been using as resource. Itââ¬â¢s pre Versailles but we all know the population transfers that have taken place since.
The Greeks, genetically speaking, are not particularly close to anyone and it would be interesting to see how close they are to Southern Italians and compare that with a separate grouping for those North of Rome or the Lombardi types instead of making do with what is undoubtedly an average for the entire country. Linguistically, they are unique.
For the rest of the continent it turns out that the standard Germanic, Romance, or Slavic designations for the major linguistic Aryan subgroups are not especially helpful in gauging genetic proximity.
The English are very close to all their neighbours and it makes no difference whether their language is Germanic or Romance (e.g., closer to Danes and French than Scots). Of course, of all Europeans they are most eager to atone for past sins and are importing w*gs at a rate that would make the US proud.
The Romance countries present a reasonably tight genetic grouping, except perhaps the French who are genetically cosier to their eternal Germanic rivals. Itââ¬â¢s unfortunate that the calculator neglected to include the Romanian population--the ideal control variable. It is a Romance country in a sea of Slavs, but having visited there on couple occasions I think that based on appearance (not the best of indicators) they would be fairly distant to what one would find in the heart of European Aryandom.
For the Slavic countries, proximity is a fair indicator but political boundaries and geographic obstacles have produced curious results. Russiaââ¬â¢s closeness to Poland is no surprise but the genetic distance between them and the Czechs, the westernmost Slavic tribe is peculiar. I would naturally expect to have more in common with people who speak languages closely related to my own than with Swiss or Austrians, but DNA charts say otherwise.
The Hungarians, people that some history books claim to be remnants of Attilaââ¬â¢s armies, boast a language that defies grouping but, predictably, are genetically closest to those who share their boarders or are near by.
Lesson for the day, as if anyone needed to be reminded: Your genetics come to resemble the company you keep. And it is irrelevant what language you speak, what culture you embrace, or where you hail from. Genetic prognosis for the denizens of North America absent racial separation and draconian enforcement policies is straightforward: Latin America for the Southwest and Texas, Nubia for the rest of the South and Eastern half of US and Canada, and Oriental Siberia for the Pacific Northwest. :hit:
2003-06-03 11:17 | User Profile
**
I agree. In fact, the word "Slav" is only accurately applied to Russians, Poles Belarussians and Northern Ukrainians, who do in fact derive mostly from the original Slavs, and are Corded Nordic/Baltic by race. **
IMO the word "Slav" is strictly linguistic term and it should not be used in racial context since many Slavic speaking peoples are derived from non-Slavic etnitities. Russians, Poles Belarussians and Northern Ukrainians also. In opposite case we would ignore expansion of Iranic speaking Iron Age Arya tribes; Scytians, Sarmatians (constitutive forefathers of my people - The Croats) and Cimmerians which maniged to concure Slavs, give them idea of statehood and accept their language in return.
[url=http://www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/chapter-VI5.htm]http://www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/chapter-VI5.htm[/url]
** Though Southern Slavs share some mitochondrial DNA with the Northern Slavs, most of their genes can be traced to Balkan aborigines. **
I must underline that the term "Balkan" is strictly geographical - and as such it was the home of wery different branches (Ilyrians, Kelts and Hellens) even in ancient times before the latest migration of Germanic peoples, Slavs and finaly Croats and Serbs. It is also not posible to talk about some uniformed race of this natives. Tall and fair doleocephalic native Kelt from Croatian province Lika or Atlanto-Mediteranean native from Dalmatian province or Dinaric Croat from Hertzegowina has wery little to do with short and brown skined oriental looking neo Greek.
I doubt, for example, that the average Montenegrin has much more Slavic ancestry than the average Greek.
The territory of present day Monte Negro was called once "Red Croatia" (Crvena Hrvatska), the Old Monte negro population (doday preserved in mountain areas) are the tallest people in Europe. Their gigantic hight thay own to their Dinaric race, their redish pale skin to the Croatian invasion in late 6-7th century BC. There is absolutley nothing Slavic in this isolated mountain population because thay are mixture of Illirian Dinarics and Nordsh - Alpine Old-Croats of Sarmato-Iranic origins.
ÃÂ ÃÂ -the elites of Yugoslavia are Corded Nordics of Slavic derivation, but the brunt of the population is of indigenous origin.
Yugoslawia was artificial state much like Soviet Union with many different etnicities united by force around the Serbian nationalism and its mayor instrument - linguistic and non-scientific pan-Slavic dogma. So I prefer to speak about the nations instead to use blur phrases like "South Slavs", Yugoslawia" or even worse "Balkano". In 7th century when Slavic speaking Croats from "White Croatia" (Bjela Hrvatska)- around Krakow to the Balkans thay found Slavs (which appeared at 5 century as the slaves of Asiatic Avars) thay destroyed Avars and brought liberty to the Slavs integrating them in their national body. This type of Slavic presence here is prooved only in the panonian part of Croatia called Slavonia. So here the elite was always made from Croats which are not exclusivelly doliocephalic-Nordic but dinaics and Alpine also. I am not certain that Corded type is in question exclusivelly when we are speaking about Iranic - Kurgan nations of the Steps, at least not from the facts that I reed in Coons work.
Also I fail to see the practical advantages of doliocephalism on the quality of some ethnic grupation. My Sarmatian ancestors regardless of scullshape invented heawy armored cavalry which strenght was known even on British islands and memorised threw Arthurian myths. Some historians belive that King Arthur Pendragon himself was descendent of Sarmatian general hired by Romans. That is why you can see the Red Dargon (Symbol of Sarmatian cavalry which was also adopted into Roman military insignia) on the flag of Wales even today.
2003-06-03 19:46 | User Profile
Originally posted by Zvaci@Jun 3 2003, 05:17 ** IMO the word "Slav" is strictly linguistic term and it should not be used in racial context since many Slavic speaking peoples are derived from non-Slavic etnitities. **
I agree in principle, but when someone speaks of Greekes being simply "Byzantine Slavs", it should be pointed out that the phrase is meaningless since there are few descendant of the original Slavs in that area.
Russians, Poles Belarussians and Northern Ukrainians also.
Well, Poles and Belarussians are descended almost entirely from Slavic stock, with Baltic and Germanic admixture. Russians have Finno-Ugric admixture in the East and Germanic admixture in certain areas, not to mention ancient Iranic strains in the South. Ukrainians have probably as much ancient Iranic blood as Slavic, and there is a Turkic strain in the Dnepropetrovsk region (ever see Brezhnev?). However, the fact remains that if you want to see direct descendant sof the ancient Slavs, Russia or Poland are the way to go.
**In opposite case we would ignore expansion of Iranic speaking Iron Age Arya tribes; Scytians, Sarmatians (constitutive forefathers of my people - The Croats) and Cimmerians which maniged to concure Slavs, give them idea of statehood and accept their language in return.
[url=http://www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/chapter-VI5.htm]http://www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/chapter-VI5.htm[/url]**
In ancient times, the various Iranian tribes that roamed the stepper region of Russia were identical to the Slavs.
I must underline that the term "Balkan" is strictly geographical - and as such it was the home of wery different branches (Ilyrians, Kelts and Hellens) even in ancient times before the latest migration of Germanic peoples, Slavs and finaly Croats and Serbs. It is also not posible to talk about some uniformed race of this natives. Tall and fair doleocephalic native Kelt from Croatian province Lika or Atlanto-Mediteranean native from Dalmatian province or Dinaric Croat from Hertzegowina has wery little to do with short and brown skined oriental looking neo Greek.
As I understand it, the Dinaric type (which is only a phenotype, not a race) is most common in Yugoslavia. Greeks are indeed darker than Southern Slavs, (as I pointed out, they constitute the genetic periphery of Europe-perhaps this is why Dienekes Pontikos is so eager to claim that Middle Eastern "Mediterraneans" are somehow identical to European (Iberian and British) "Mediterraneans" when in fact the only thing the two have in common is a relatively brunet pigmentation and doliocephaly).
** The territory of present day Monte Negro was called once "Red Croatia" (Crvena Hrvatska), the Old Monte negro population (doday preserved in mountain areas) are the tallest people in Europe. Their gigantic hight thay own to their Dinaric race, their redish pale skin to the Croatian invasion in late 6-7th century BC. There is absolutley nothing Slavic in this isolated mountain population because thay are mixture of Illirian Dinarics and Nordsh - Alpine Old-Croats of Sarmato-Iranic origins.**
Agreed.
In 7th century when Slavic speaking Croats from "White Croatia" (Bjela Hrvatska)- around Krakow to the Balkans thay found Slavs (which appeared at 5 century as the slaves of Asiatic Avars) thay destroyed Avars and brought liberty to the Slavs integrating them in their national body. This type of Slavic presence here is proved only in the panonian part of Croatia called Slavonia. So here the elite was always made from Croats which are not exclusivelly doliocephalic-Nordic but dinaics and Alpine also. I am not certain that Corded type is in question exclusivelly when we are speaking about Iranic - Kurgan nations of the Steps, at least not from the facts that I reed in Coons work.
Coon is outdated, and his work on the Slavs, is, quite literally, worse than useless. He was under the strange misapprehension that many ethnic Russians were of Uralic type and that a snub-nosed, partly Uralic "Neo-Danubian" type was the main component of the Russian racial mixture, when in fact not only are Uralics exceedingly rare among ethnic Russians, Russians also have high nasal indices than the European average. I prefer the work of Russian anthropologists who actually took time to study Slavic populations; Tatiana Alekseeva, Valeriy Alekseey, V. V Bunak (somewhat outdated, but still good), V. Ye. Deryabin, etc...
Also I fail to see the practical advantages of doliocephalism on the quality of some ethnic grupation.
I agree. I don't think that doliocephaly makes an ethnic group more intelligent or superior in any way-in fact, brachycepahs, especially Cro-Magnoids tend to have larger brains. In any case, doliocephaly is a variable trait that fluctuates and changes with time. The average cepahlic index has increased from 74 to 84 in Poland with no foreign admixture.
** My Sarmatian ancestors regardless of scullshape invented heawy armored cavalry which strenght was known even on British islands and memorised threw Arthurian myths. Some historians belive that King Arthur Pendragon himself was descendent of Sarmatian general hired by Romans. That is why you can see the Red Dargon (Symbol of Sarmatian cavalry which was also adopted into Roman military insignia) on the flag of Wales even today. **
Interesting-I've never hear about that before. From what I understand, the Croats are fairer than other Yugoslavs, with more Nordid and Mediterranean strains, as opposed to Dinaric. Is this true?
2003-06-04 02:14 | User Profile
** I agree in principle, but when someone speaks of Greekes being simply "Byzantine Slavs", it should be pointed out that the phrase is meaningless since there are few descendant of the original Slavs in that area. **
I think the term Bysantine Slav is an oximoron because Bysantine empire was European form of Racial melting pot. Presence of the Slavs was historic fact, but to belive they maniged to survive intact in this Babylon of the Balkan penisula- specially after Ottoman invasion would be a fiction. Some rare traces can be found perhaps, but the mayor racial make up is clearly Middle eastern.
** Ukrainians have probably as much ancient Iranic blood as Slavic, **
It is infact the place of the firts mentionigs of Croatian name on the European continent, on the Sarmatian tablets from Tanais on the Black See. [url=http://www.magma.ca/~rendic/chapter1.htm]http://www.magma.ca/~rendic/chapter1.htm[/url] By the generosity of the new Russian state this inscriptions are surendured recently to us as the state gift together with some other ornamental traces characteristical for both old Iranic and our medieval art like chessbordfields and "pleteric" ornament. They are priceless for the search of our ruths and history. I have also reed that ethnologists of 19 century was fascinated when they discovered numerous toponims that direct toward our name- even vilage in Ukrainia called Horvacia, also the strange forms of Ukrainian language that are very close with out old dialect called Kajkavian, together with many folklor simmilarities.
** In ancient times, the various Iranian tribes that roamed the stepper region of Russia were identical to the Slavs.**
That fact explains the term "proto-Slavonic" oftenly used for earlly Iranic nomads of the Steps. It is my belief that thay are of commune or simmilar Arya stock regardless the fact that there is no direct evidence that Slavs and Proto-Slavonic called them selves using "Arya" name as their Asian relaties - the ruling elite of Medes and Persians of Achemenian Persia.
** As I understand it, the Dinaric type (which is only a phenotype, not a race) is most common in Yugoslavia.**
Globally speaking yes, the phenomenon of Dinaricism is whidelly spread specially in various and numerous combinations with other phenotypes like forinstance Dinraricized Nordic, or Alpine-Dinaric combinations ect. That fact creates in many cases difficulties to make a clear subracial classification according the standard (Nordic-Alpine-Mediterranean) division.
** Greeks are indeed darker than Southern Slavs, (as I pointed out, they constitute the genetic periphery of Europe-perhaps this is why Dienekes Pontikos is so eager to claim that Middle Eastern "Mediterraneans" are somehow identical to European (Iberian and British) "Mediterraneans" when in fact the only thing the two have in common is a relatively brunet pigmentation and doliocephaly).**
The subject of Greeks is usualy some sort of taboo specially amongst American WN of SF type, and I have to admit that I burned my fingers many times when I attempted to break that taboo. Greek state is financing the whole campain to rewrite thousands of years of history to proove they are pure "sons of Ahileius" :rolleyes: . Allso using transparent tricks like showing pictures of American Greeks which are mixed with fair Whites and call that half-half individuals as aledged offsprings of Dorians. Nobody can force me to belive that most of them today are even shadows of Greeks in the time of Homer. You posted very good and informative link (refuting RM), however I would not go so fahr to call race of Socrates inferior- infats by looking his face closelly I cant notice only the archetypical Alpine characteristics wich has nothing to do with Oriental looking Neo-Greeks with Negro and Turkish traces.
** I prefer the work of Russian anthropologists who actually took time to study Slavic populations; Tatiana Alekseeva, Valeriy Alekseey, V. V Bunak (somewhat outdated, but still good), V. Ye. Deryabin, etc...**
I must admit that I started to learn about phisical anthropology only threw my primary interest in etno-genesiss and unfortunatlly only threw limited well known internet sources.
** Interesting-I've never hear about that before.**
I searched a lot about the Sarmatians since I was interested in their connection with Croatians and I found some fascinating links like this ones. In fact it seems thay was precursors of Medieval style knighthood.
[url=http://www.xpresspress.com/news/romanofficer_121802.html]http://www.xpresspress.com/news/romanoffic...cer_121802.html[/url]
[url=http://www.prah.net/slovenia/press/augustan/augustan.htm]http://www.prah.net/slovenia/press/augusta...an/augustan.htm[/url]
[url=http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/history/arthurarmy.htm]http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/history.../arthurarmy.htm[/url]
[url=http://www.hungary.com/hungq/no144/p113.html]http://www.hungary.com/hungq/no144/p113.html[/url]
From what I understand, the Croats are fairer than other Yugoslavs, with more Nordid and Mediterranean strains, as opposed to Dinaric. Is this true?
Yes and no: Yes - because more you go to the South of Yugoslavia you shall find gradualy darker and darker populations. Also Croatia and Slowenia was never subjected to the Turks during Ottoman invasion, infact Croatia was the final battle wall of the Christian world (Antemurale Christianitatis) as the old writers called it. Also there are no real dark Mediterraneans here, unlike in other parts of Yugoslavia that was influenced by "Vlachs" - Non Slavic Romanian looking people. Only Nordic-Alpines-Dinaric with some light skined Atlanto-Mediterraneans (not in big numbers around the costal area of Dalmatian province) Is present in Croatia. No because there are no drastic contrasts between naighbouring ex-republics (not like in the case of obvious contrasts of North and South Italy), the differences are gradual. I would say that we are more Nordid and fair looking than population of South Serbia, but in the same level with Northern parts of Serbia which has some nordic strains also.
2003-06-04 06:35 | User Profile
Originally posted by Prodigal Son@May 23 2003, 14:41 ** [url=http://www.geocities.com/refuting_rm/7.html]Link: Are the Greeks "still" Indo-European?[/url]
I don't agree with everything on that page though. **
I don't consider to anon (who is a nordicist that hates so much to the southern europeans and especially to the Greeks) like a good source, citing him is like citing to Jay Gould to prove the existence of the races or citing the ADL to know more about WN.
2003-06-04 16:04 | User Profile
ÃÂ I don't consider to anon (who is a nordicist that hates so much to the southern europeans and especially to the Greeks) like a good source,
I tend to evaluate some authors work on account of WHAT he writes, not WHO he is. The most of the sources I find here are very educative. That does not mean that have to accept every judgement here- forinstance that looks of Alpine Socrates was commune or characteristic only for the lower stratum, while the elite was threw and threw fair and Nordic.
I don't hate "Southern Europeans" and like you see, I don't have to be Noricist puritan to notice that something is WRONG with Greek statement that there was no race mixing in Greece what so ever. You don't have to be racial expert to notice this, two healthy eyes are enough to notice non typical appearance of the Levantine Greeks. :afro:
2003-06-04 17:00 | User Profile
Originally posted by Madrid burns@Jun 4 2003, 00:35 ** I don't consider to anon (who is a nordicist that hates so much to the southern europeans and especially to the Greeks) like a good source, citing him is like citing to Jay Gould to prove the existence of the races or citing the ADL to know more about WN. **
Well, anon's obvious hatred of Southern Europeans aside, I have to say that he did a fine job putting his site together. His sources are excellent, and his rendition of them is very well done as well. Also, to his credit, unlike RM, anon never blatantly lies on his site. I've known RM to take pictures of Turkmen, Uzbeks, Yakuts, Maris and Jews and try to pass them off as "Russians." He also edited a map of genetic variation from Cavalli-Sfroza and placed the caption "Mongoloid ancestry" on it. RM also idiotically maintains that Southenr Russians are "Alpine-Mediterranean" when both EGR and I have pointed it out to the idiot that Southern Russians have 30% blonde haire (I don't know of any "Alpine-Mediterraneans" with 30% blonde hair, if you do, please enlighten me) and have more pure light eyes than any Scandinavian group. As for the Neo-Danubians, who RM claims are the the main element in Russia, they don't exist as a population, but only as sporadic examples of Nordic Slavic and Finno-Ugric East-Baltic mixture.
Either way, anon or no anon, to maintain, as Pontikos does, that the Greeks have not changed in 2500 years is utterly ridiculous. Russians have changed in the last 1000 years. Britons have changed in the last 1000 years. Irishmen have changed in the last 160 years. To say that the Greeks remained fundamentally true to their genotype while being part of the Byzantine Empire, the "melting pot" of the East Mediterranean, is the height of idiocy.
2003-06-04 21:23 | User Profile
Originally posted by Zvaci@Jun 3 2003, 20:14 ** You posted very good and informative link (refuting RM), however I would not go so fahr to call race of Socrates inferior- infats by looking his face closelly I cant notice only the archetypical Alpine characteristics wich has nothing to do with Oriental looking Neo-Greeks with Negro and Turkish traces.
**
I agree. Alpines, just like so-called Mediteraneans and Dinarics are not a race, but rather a phenotype. The German "Alpine" has little in common with Anatolian and Greek "Alpines".
2003-06-06 03:04 | User Profile
[QUOTE= Prodigal Son Jun 4 2003, 23:23] Well, anon's obvious hatred of Southern Europeans aside, I have to say that he did a fine job putting his site together. His sources are excellent, and his rendition of them is very well done as well.[/QUOTE]
Yeah right, good sources like Gunter, Grant, Ray Smith, old issues of the Atlantic magazine and several afrocentrists :D
[QUOTE= Also, to his credit, unlike RM, anon never blatantly lies on his site. I've known RM to take pictures of Turkmen, Uzbeks, Yakuts, Maris and Jews and try to pass them off as "Russians." He also edited a map of genetic variation from Cavalli-Sfroza and placed the caption "Mongoloid ancestry" on it..[/QUOTE]
Uhm, I am not a follower of RM neither I approve his theories (I consider quite ridiculous his declaration that the current North africans are so Caucasoid like Europeans), I consider him and to Anon as very negative characters because they are too much obsessed with the insignificant Non-Caucasoid admixture present in the europeans populations. I think that their agendas are very divisive for the Pro-white and Pro-Western cause
[QUOTE= RM also idiotically maintains that Southenr Russians are "Alpine-Mediterranean" when both EGR and I have pointed it out to the idiot that Southern Russians have 30% blonde haire (I don't know of any "Alpine-Mediterraneans" with 30% blonde hair, if you do, please enlighten me) and have more pure light eyes than any Scandinavian group. As for the Neo-Danubians, who RM claims are the the main element in Russia, they don't exist as a population, but only as sporadic examples of Nordic Slavic and Finno-Ugric East-Baltic mixture.[/QUOTE]
Well, Anon and your friend EGR say that the southern europeans are mongrels, I have seen very nasty posts in the RM board written by them (for example: [url=http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/message?forumid=233031&messageid=1054753360)]http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/messag...eid=1054753360)[/url] in those that trashing the southern europeans.
[QUOTE= Prodigal Son Jun 4 2003, 00:35] Either way, anon or no anon, to maintain, as Pontikos does, that the Greeks have not changed in 2500 years is utterly ridiculous. Russians have changed in the last 1000 years. Britons have changed in the last 1000 years. Irishmen have changed in the last 160 years. To say that the Greeks remained fundamentally true to their genotype while being part of the Byzantine Empire, the "melting pot" of the East Mediterranean, is the height of idiocy.[/QUOTE]
I agree on that but I think the same thing of those who argue that the Greeks are not white or that their civilization declined due to a mythological process of race mixing or that all the creators of the European civilizations were Nordic and other Gobinists ideas.
Bye