Ancient Eugenics
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491_9781646065493
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An Oxford scholar reveals in this superbly-researched work that the ancient Greeks and Romans were aware of the power of eugenics to better their societies—but practiced it in a reactive nature instead of the proactive and humane methodologies developed 2000 years later by Francis Galton and others.This work provides numerous citations from ancient Greek and Latin texts—Aristotle, Plutarch, and others—which describe in detail eugenic methods as understood and practiced by the classical Greeks and Romans.The reactive nature of ancient eugenics was centered around infanticide, which, the author points out, was considered barbaric even then, but regarded as a necessity for a city state immersed in perennial crises and warfare.The Spartan leader Solon drafted the first eugenic laws, and the Stoic Roman philosopher Seneca encouraged infanticide for misfits. “We drown the weaklings and the monstrosity. It is not passion but reason to separate the useless from the fit.”Roper goes on to explain why these ancient Eugenic practices gradually lost their appeal.“Cosmopolitanism, consequent on the dissolution of the city state, not only brought individualism in its train, but let loose the inveterate pessimism of the Ancients.“But pessimism, linked with individualism, became a living force in a despairing age, which had never developed evolutionary conceptions . . . Neither the future nor the past matters, but only the present. Individualism and belief in inevitable decadence were the two influences which effectually thwarted the growth of Ancient Eugenics.”The author goes on to explain why, in his day, eugenics had once again come to the fore. Based on humane preventative methodologies and an understanding of the realities of biology and heredity, he writes of the science of eugenics:“It was not till late in the nineteenth century that the crude human breeding of the Spartans, in altered form and in new conditions, became th
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