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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
In 1864 the biologist George Lewes wrote (p. viii) ‘Numerous and exhaustive as are the works devoted to Aristotle’s moral and metaphysical writings, there is not one which attempts to display, with any fullness, his scientific researches . . . Although Aristotle mainly represents the science of twenty centuries, his scientific writings are almost unknown in England. Casual citations, mostly at second hand, and vague eulogies, often betraying great misconception, are abundant; but rare indeed is the indication of any accurate appreciation extending beyond two works, the De Anima, and the History of Animals. The absence of translations is at once a cause and a sign of this neglect.’
Things have improved, a bit, in the intervening 135 years. Cohen and Drabkin brought together a large and diverse selection of English translations of ancient scientific works in 1948. Every year for the last 25 years, on average, there has been a new edition or notification of the discovery of a new scientific text. Galen has been the focus of a recent scholarly project whose proportions reflect his corpus. Nevertheless, despite the 9,000 printed pages of that vast corpus already published, there are still unedited and untranslated treatises surviving in full in Arabic, and two-thirds of the corpus still awaits an English translation. The state of editions and translations of ancient scientific works as a whole remains scandalous by comparison with the torrent of modern works on anything unscientific – about 100 papers per year on Homer, for example. And an embarrassingly large number of classicists are as (if not more) ignorant of Greek scientific works as their predecessors were in 1864.
1 A Sourcebook in Greek Science, reprinted in 1958. It is apparently still available from the USA, to order, at vast expense. Ask in your local bookshop.
2 Over 100 are listed in L’Année philologique 1995, for example.
3 See Lloyd 1985 p. 1. Cohen and Drabkin made similar points in their Preface of 1948. This ignorance continues. For example, a Canadian classicist and an Oxford classicist, writing about the finances of the Athenian empire, stated in a book edited by another Oxford classicist and published by OUP in 1990 that ‘The Greek counting system was not decimal but sexagesimal’. Unsurpris ingly they give no reference for this statement, and I assume that they did not bother to consult any book on ancient mathematics, where they would have read clearly and unambiguously that the Greeks worked with the decimal system, e.g. Thomas in the Loeb Greek Mathematical Works, vol. 1, English notes on arithmetical notation and operations, which opens with the statement: ‘From earliest times the Greeks followed the decimal system of enumeration.’ Those more familiar with Greek mathematics will know that sexagesimal notation, derived from the Babylonians, appears from the Hellenistic period on, in astronomy, usually for fractions (whole numbers continue to be expressed in ordinary Greek notation, producing a mixed system still used by astronomers today).
4 And the Analemma, Geography, Handy Tables, Harmonics, Hypotheses, Optics, Phaseis, Simple Sphere and Tetrabiblos.
5 This essential research tool in classics omits most of the scientific authors from chapter 8, ‘MS authorities for the text of the chief classical writers’ - even Galen, whose printed corpus constitutes about 10% of all surviving Greek literature up to 300 A.D., and bulks more than twice as large as his nearest rivals in volume of output, Aristotle and Plutarch (Nutton, 1999, p. 5). It has little to say even on those included, e.g. Theophrastos: item 1, The Characters, gets 15 lines; items 2-7, Inquiry into Plants, Causes of Plants, On Stones, On Fire, On Sense and Sensibility, and Metaphysics, get 7 lines between them. So while one of the 7 plates to the volume (and one of only two which picture people) features ‘A Greek physician reading’ (emphasis added), there is no reference to Hippokrates or Dioskorides or Galen in chapter 8.