Of Ancient Customs

Reading the historians with any attention, one accumulates a long catalogue of practices that our age finds absurd, incomprehensible, or simply monstrous, and that those who performed them found not only natural but obligatory. The Spartans washed their children in wine rather than water. The Scythians drank from the skulls of their defeated enemies as a mark of honour, not brutality. The Romans watched men kill one another for entertainment and wept at tragedies performed by actors, which is very nearly the reverse of what we would expect from a civilised people. The Greeks thought it proper for men to exercise entirely naked; we find this so remarkable that we cannot mention it without a kind of nervous laughter.

Each of these customs, examined in its own context, makes a kind of sense. The Spartan logic about wine and children was medicinal in its intention. The skull-cup was a trophy like any other trophy, differing only in material. The gladiatorial shows produced courage, it was argued, in those who watched — they accustomed citizens to the sight of violence and death, which was not thought a bad thing in a military people. As for Greek nakedness at the gymnasium, it was once thought as indecent as we now find it unremarkable. Every practice has its apology when it is current; every apology seems hollow when the practice has passed.

“The question we never ask of our own customs is the question we always ask of others’: by what reason is this done? We assume our own practices need no reason, being natural; we require every alien practice to justify itself before we will concede it has any claim on our respect.”

What customs of our own time will seem strangest to those who come after us? I have my suspicions, though I will express them cautiously. The ways in which we treat those who are powerless — the poor, prisoners, the sick, animals — will not, I think, bear the scrutiny of a more reflective age. We congratulate ourselves endlessly on having improved upon the Romans’ cruelty; we do not ask what cruelties of our own we are too habituated to notice. Every age is blind to itself in this way. Ours is no exception.