Chapter 1
In: Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
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Abstract
In this chapter, Moses argues that Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropology integrates values and ideas that he first encountered in the work of his favourite classical Roman poets. Long before he had ever heard of Charles Darwin, Morgan was immersed in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a panoramic explication of natural and social evolution and the poems of Horace. As an advocate of social evolution, Morgan hit against the biblical narrative of human origins and revived a paradigm bequeathed to him by ancient Greece and Rome. He moved further away from the Calvinist Protestantism of his birth toward what might be called a revised Epicurean or ancient perspective, which is also the modern secular point of view. Moses argues that just as the classical philosophers and poets used the “barbarians” they encountered as foils in their own social critiques, Morgan used Native Americans to launch a critique of the same triumphant commercial civilization that he both celebrated and prospered from. For Morgan, the Iroquois and other “primitive” peoples preserved the wisdom that drew him as a young man to his Latin poetry and then to anthropology. Moses thus explores the lifelong relationship Morgan had with Lucretius and Horace, and how the ethos expressed by these poets regarding definitions of wealth and the life well lived is at the core of Morgan’s worldview and scholarly work.