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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
The essential difference between science and related forms of intellectual activity is very difficult to define exactly. A dictionary definition of science is an accurate reflection of what some people understand by the term ‘science’, and then only in the period and place in which the dictionary was written. Most people live their lives and use their language without reference to a dictionary. Even sticking to the dictionary definition, what the word ‘science’ has meant to different people has varied over time and cultures, and its meaning continues to change. As such, the term itself can be a source of anachronism in the study of science in ancient times. For we naturally tend to find in ancient authors just those sorts of things which we recognize as science in our own times, and to ignore those things which are incomprehensible or just plain wrong – to our way of thinking. And we naturally tend to organize what we find into categories which reflect our way of dividing up the world into subjects and disciplines. Thus things that the ancients linked together, we tear apart and treat separately. In particular, some we include in the category of science, others we exclude.
1 According to Crombie 1994 there are, and historically have been, six and only six distinct styles of scientific thinking. A scientific style is a way of thinking about the world that aims ‘to advance knowledge by the identification of answerable questions and soluble problems, to devise methods of finding possible answers and solutions, and at the same time to determine what counted among these as acceptable’ (p. ix). Each style focused its inquiries upon certain regular natural phenomena, decided what sort of question would be considered valid, and determined what sort of answers would be acceptable. ‘A style thus opened certain routes of inquiry and closed others’ (vol. 1, p. xi). The Greek style of scientific thinking, the earliest European style and a style which has continued to the present day, he calls Postulation, and discusses at length in volume 1.
2 Astrology was also closely linked with medicine, chemistry (under the ancient label phusis, physics), botany, and anthropology. For the first, see Scarborough 1991 esp. pp. 154-63.
3 E.g. Cohen and Drabkin 1948, pp. viii-ix: ‘No one can well deny that a good deal of what may be called “pseudo-science”, such as astrology and the like, can be found in the writings of such sober Greek scientists as Aristotle and Ptolemy. But it is well to remember that the intrusion of the occult can be found in modern writings such as Kepler’s or Newton’s and in the contributions to the early volumes of the transactions of the Royal Society down to the works of Lodge, Carrel and Eddington in our own day.’
4 See e.g. Keyser 1990a.
5 See Owens 1991.
6 This is a problem with French’s otherwise excellent Ancient Natural History, which is sometimes frustrating, but rewards well the diligent reader.
7 Knorr 1991 p. 122 n. 11.
8 Needham suggested that this abstract approach arose because ‘the social background of Hellenistic science and technology can be taken for granted because it is quite familiar to us from our schooldays onwards’, 1962 §26 p. xxvi. This familiarity might have been true for some 30 years ago, but it is sadly untrue today, and a generation of scholars who allegedly took social knowledge for granted, and thus neglected to draw out its significance, seems to have led to scholarship which does not recognize its significance at all, typified in e.g. Barnes 1979.
9 There was a publicly owned gymnasium there from at least the late fifth century, for public use.
10 Any Athenian citizen who wished.
11 See Lynch 1972. The same general point is true of Plato’s Academy; see Cherniss 1945.
12 This prevented him from committing suicide by mouth after his capture by the Romans, and caused him to fall on his sword instead.
13 We have one name, Krateuas. Very little is known about him, other than that he was known as a rootcutter, he lived at Mithridates’ court, and he wrote a lost, illustrated, work on plants, which may have been the basis for later herbals such as that by Dioskorides; see Wellmann 1897, with Riddle’s discussion 1985 pp. 180-217. Attalus III of Pergamum was also (and a generation earlier) interested in and very knowledgeable about toxic substances and antidotes, which he tested on condemned criminals (Galen, Antidotes, 1.1 (14.2 K)), and on ‘friends’ according to the hostile tradition in Justin’s Epitome of Trogus’ History of Philip 36.4.3.
14 This observation was made first by the Greeks themselves. Diodorus Siculus 2.29.6: ‘a few [Greeks] here and there really strive for the higher studies and continue in the pursuit of them as a profit-making business, and these are always trying to make innovations in connection with the most important doctrines instead of following in the path of their predecessors. The result of this is that the barbarians, by sticking to the same things always, keep a firm hold on every detail, while the Greeks, on the other hand, aiming at the profit to be made out of the business, keep founding new schools and, wrangling with each other over the most important matters of speculation, bring it about that their pupils hold conflicting views, and that their minds, vacillating throughout their lives and unable to believe anything at all with firm conviction, simply wander in confusion. It is at any rate true that, if a man were to examine carefully the most famous schools of the philosophers, he would find them differing from one another to the uttermost degree and maintaining opposite opinions regarding the most fundamental tenets’ (trans. Oldfather). There are examples from the medical field and discussion of this point in Lloyd 1995 and Hankinson 1995.
15 Aiskhulos famously wanted recorded on his gravestone not that he wrote this or that tragedy, but that he fought at Marathon. As a hoplite, it is a safe assumption that he was a farmer, as were more than 90% of the population. Thoukudides wrote history when forced into exile after active (but unsuccessful, hence exile) service as general in the Peloponnesian war; Xenophon was a professional soldier, again largely because he was exiled and thus prevented from engaging in farming and politics; Cicero was a professional politician first, and author of diverse subjects second; Plutarch was a politician, priest at Delphi and much else besides; the list could be as long as the authors about whom we have biographical information. Why then should we suppose that those who wrote what we call ‘scientific treatises’, about whom we usually have little if any reliable biographical information, were fundamentally different, a class apart from authors of all other types of literary work? For example, later Greeks knew so little about Euclid that they confused the Euclid of Elements with another philosopher called Euclid who came from Megara. See also Authier 1995 on Plutarch as creator of the (false) archetypical image of the scientist, and its perseverance in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary.
16 Nutton assumes the same of ‘most doctors resident in a small town’ and points out that ‘doctors were regularly encouraged to grow their own simples’ [simple drugs], 1985b quotes from p. 140. All those Greek scientists who played a part in the politics of their local poleis (e.g. Arkhytas, Empedokles, Eudoxos, Hippias, Philolaos) may confidently be assumed to have owned farms. Polubios (3.59.3-5) thought that many Greeks of the Hellenistic and Roman periods pursued an intellectual life because political domination by Macedon, the successor states, and then Rome, ‘relieved’ them of the ambition to pursue a life in war and politics when not managing their farms. Polubios himself was a case in point.
17 By al-Andalusi, Saïd in the Book of Categories of Nations, 1991 p. 26 Google Scholar. The association is not accidental: the geometer’s tools are the carpenter’s tools - compass and set square or gnomon. Hahn (1995, p. 126 n. 25) drew attention to ‘a kind of applied geometry with technological innovation’ which characterizes the real or attributed achievements of Thales, Anaximander, Rhoikos, Theodoros, Khersiphron, and Metagenes. Although only the first two are generally thought of as presocratic philosophers (the other four being labelled architect/engineers) I believe that the kind of employment specialization these labels imply is inappropriate for the period.
18 Namely, Celer the centurion, Diogas the trainer, Euskhemos the eunuch, Flavius the boxer, Orion the groom (which indicates an overlap between human and veterinary medicine), and Philoxenos the schoolmaster, all cited by Nutton in his hugely entertaining, as well as very informative, article on ‘The drug trade in antiquity’, 1985b, p. 145.
19 Cicero, nearest in time of those remarking on his origins, described Archimedes as ‘a humble little man’, Tusc.Disp. 5.23, which can hardly refer to his personality as revealed in his surviving works, and therefore ought to be read as a reference to his socio-economic status. Silius Italicus thought likewise, calling Archimedes destitute (nudus), Punica 14.343. This, however, did not fit at all with Plutarch’s image of the scientist induced only by Roman soldiers besieging the city to tear himself away from contemplation of abstract mathematics and get his hands dirty in an occasional bit of mechanical engineering, so Plutarch Marcellus 14.5 says he was a relative (unspecified) and friend of Hieron.
20 Aristeas, , Epistle 10, 29–30 Google Scholar. He too was ‘not well-born’ according to Diog. Laert. 5.75.
21 e.g. Poseidonios of Apameia and famously Karneades, who so irritated Cato (Plut. Cato 22- 3). Similarly the historian Polubios, who went to Rome as a political hostage for the good behaviour of his home community, the Achaian League, after they lost the battle of Pudna.
22 His treatise on the Aqueducts was completed under Trajan. Before that he had written military treatises for Domitian, and a work on surveying.
23 Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the primary sources (prior to the C2 A.D.) are notoriously uninterested in biography and autobiography, so we must be content with probabilities. Greek scientists did not leave memoirs - even Galen did not leave a memoir as such. On his many autobiographical comments scattered through his works, it is essential to understand the context, for which see Nutton 1972, to whose points we should add one more, concerning forgeries. ‘Forgers’ might not simply be in the business of trying to make sales of their own works by passing them off as Galen’s; they might rather be medical opponents in the business of trying to discredit him, as Anaximenes of Lampsakos ‘forged’ one of his rivals, the historian Theopompos, to damage him (Pausanias 6.18.2). There are of course secondary sources written in antiquity, by men like Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Famous Philosophers), Philostratos (Lives of the Sophists) and Eunapios (Lives of the Philosophers), but they are all late (C3-4 A.D.) and generally unreliable - they are mentioned frequently in modern scholarship because we are beggars for biographical information and have no other choice. On the hypothetical Greek boy, my feeling is that the more ‘elite’ the father considered himself and his family to be, the more opposed he would have been to this idea.
24 Much of what he has written since 1979; see e.g. Lloyd 1992. See further below §2.
25 For examples illustrating the importance of this type of approach for reaching a fuller and deeper understanding of the scientific context of such texts, see e.g. Klein 1968 on mathematics (arithmos means a number of things, not just an abstract quantity); Osborne 1987 on the importance of the literary context in which fragments of the presocratics appear in later authors; Solmsen 1975 on presocratic and Socratic ways of thinking evidenced in history and drama (and other forms of non-philosophical/scientific literature); Rihll and Tucker 1999 on the socio-economic context of theories of matter; Cosens 1998 on the importance of practicals in Galen’s treatises; and Shapiro 1994 on seventeenth-century scientists’ adoption of practising artists’ ideas on colour mixing (this has much interesting material on ancient theories of colour).
26 Introductory essay to the reprint of his Inaugural Lecture (1985), in 1989, p. 353.
27 For example, Zeno of Sidon launched what he thought was a damaging attack on Euclid’s axiomatic method. Poseidonios (amongst others) argued the toss with him; see Proclus, On Euclid’s Elements Book 1, especially 199-200, 214-18.
28 Which originated with the French scholars Gernet, Vernant, and Detienne, who argued for an association between rationality and the polis, but which has been developed by Lloyd.
29 This envisages an ‘aristocratic’ stage in the (crucial) archaic period, with a very gradual assumption of responsibility by the demos (the people), and presumes that what debates were held in this period were dominated by a few ‘great and good’ whilst the demos stood around and said or did little or nothing. This is hardly compatible with the general atmosphere of argument and debate presumed by Lloyd. He has been criticized for this reason in Hurwit 1985. The details needed to try to dovetail social and intellectual histories are also unexplicated at the moment: since the intellectual revolution started in Ionia, does Lloyd suppose that the Ionian poleis were more ‘democratic’ earlier than the mainland poleis? Is there any correlation between constitutional type and philosophers’ home towns? Although Athens is the most famous and most well-known ancient democracy, her only homegrown critical thinkers of great stature were Sokrates and Plato. Many people from other poleis found this polis a congenial place to live and think critically – at least some of the time (Anaxagoras and Aristotle, amongst others, both felt compelled by fear to skip the country at a certain point in their residencies). Which conjunction leads to the question: is there a connection between being a metic rather than a citizen, and being a free thinker? Metics, by definition, were excluded from the political environment, so if there is a connection here, it would considerably complicate Lloyd’s hypothesis. It would however tally with Polubios’ view on political and intellectual life (see n. 16 above).
30 I speak not as an historian of science but as an Ordinary’ ancient historian who cut her professional teeth on Greek political and constitutional history, especially in the archaic period.
31 See Sharples 1996 for a discussion of the main schools in Hellenistic times, arranged around their answers to various types of question rather than a traditional historical narrative or description of each school’s philosophical tenets.
32 On which see Lloyd 1991, chapter 11.
33 See Riddle 1985.
34 After a couple of hundred years of such data-gathering and processing it became possible for others to write the first encyclopaedias, which suited the Roman temperament of the times.
35 The ‘museum’ at Alexandria was not a museum in the modern sense, but a home of the muses, that is, a place where the muses’ arts were practised. The main facilities were the library and a zoo. Little zoological work of consequence was done there and I believe that it functioned more for the entertainment and adornment of Ptolemy’s court than for any investigative study of animal life.
Pickled specimens are recorded in e.g. Demostratos apud Aelian 13.21, but these are oddities or curiosities – in this example it is a supposed Triton (half man, half fish), preserved at the inland town of Tanagra.
36 Even on the most pro-active hypothesis about how Theophrastos obtained his information (Maxwell-Stuart 1996), it is supposed only that he ‘took notes of the places through which he passed in the course of his everyday life, as events directed’ (p. 266). There is no suggestion that he travelled to find answers. He did, however, start a garden (according to Diogenes Laertius’ life – written over 400 years after Theophrastos’ floruit) in which he might have grown and studied a number of plants, but he could not possibly have grown the vast majority of the plants mentioned in his botanical works, the information for which surely came from oral, and to much lesser extent written, sources.
37 E.g. Archimedes, On Plane Equilibriums, prop. 7 (principle of the lever): ‘If the magnitudes be incommensurable, they will likewise balance at distances reciprocally proportional to their magnitudes. Let (A+B) and C be incommensurable magnitudes, and let DE, EF be distances, and let the ratio of (A+B) to C be the same as the ratio of ED to EF; then I say that the centre of gravity of the magnitude composed of (A+B) and C is E’ (Thomas trans, slightly modified).
38 Derkse 1993 p. 203. ‘Ockham’s razor’ is the methodological view that in the formulation of explanations, ‘it is better to use the most limited set of explanatory elements (hypotheses, assumptions, variables) wherever possible and if adequate. Superfluous explanatory elements should be shaved away’, Derkse 1993 p. 10, emphases added. When choosing between competing explanations the same principle can be followed. Derkse argues strongly that Aristotle uses simplicity as a constant concomitant in the inductive process of intuitively grasping first principles, and that it could itself be labelled a principle on Aristotle’s theory of knowledge. ‘[Aristotle’s] abundant use of some form of the principle of parsimony, economy and simplicity is to be found in many domains and has many characteristics: as a principle of minimal ontological assumption (Physics), as a rule of method (Post. Anal.), as a criterion for theory evaluation (On the Heavens, Physics), as a heuristic device (in the biological writings), as a surprising feature of the workings of nature, which gives aesthetic satisfaction and intellectual joy (biological works)’, p. 203.
39 See e.g. Cowan 1996 or Wertheim 1997.
40 Seneca Epistles 90.20-23. Poseidonios’ attention to ‘banausic’ arts may have disappointed Seneca, but Poseidonios clearly thought these subjects worthy of serious intellectual effort.
41 Celsus 8.20.4. See also Drachmann 1963 pp. 171-85 with translations of relevant parts of Rufus, Heliodoros, and Galen apud Oreibasios, citing devices invented or improved upon by a number of named individuals who by implication were doctors. For in 49.23, when Oreibasios mentions the trispastos invented by Apellis or Archimedes, he distinguishes them by saying ‘First let us bear in mind that neither Apellis nor Archimedes was a doctor, but they were mechanics’. He continues that ‘the doctors of that time reduced the dimensions of the construction and made out of the triple pulley a surgical spanner for resetting dislocations and fractures’. Other examples of the point: Knorr 1991 argues that the Elements has a strong basis in practical applications, and Høyrup 1997 argues that (i) ‘Hero’s geometry depends to a greater extent than [is] usually assumed on Near Eastern practical geometry or its descendant traditions in the classical world’; (ii) that the conventional image of Hero ‘as the transformer of theoretical into applied mathematics is only a half-truth’; and (iii) that ‘much of what is shared by Hero’s Metrica and the pseudo-Heronian collections assembled by Heiberg as Geometrica are shared borrowings from the same [practical geometry] tradition’ (quotes from p. 67). O’Neill 1998 argues more generally that the distinction between ‘practical’ (problem-solving, constructing) and ‘theoretical’ (seeking after truth, discover ing) mathematics is overplayed and not helpful.
42 Whitney discusses these points fully, with ample references to the primary sources, in chapter 2.
43 Epistle 90.7-13, esp. 11.
44 De natura deorum 2.50. Cicero follows his teacher Poseidonios in crediting philosophers with the creation of civilization, even if he disagreed with him on much else; see e.g. Tuse. Disputations 5.2.
45 City of God 22.24. Whitney thinks that Augustine is being ironic in this passage. Identifying irony in writing is always a contentious issue, but in the area of scientific texts I agree with Scarborough and Nutton 1982 p. 214 that ‘irony is always the last refuge of the baffled translator’.
46 The distinction between and mutual independence of cosmology and astronomy in the ancients is clarified and emphasized by Hanson 1973.
47 See Frede and Striker 1996.
48 Lloyd 1983 emphasized that ‘scientific’ writings (particularly the life sciences, on which he was focused) sometimes do little more than repeat folklore, but then there is an attempt to rationalize those traditional beliefs, which sometimes involves examining them critically and testing them. He also stresses the difference between what the scientists say they should do or are doing and what they actually do, which usually falls short of these ideals to greater or lesser extent.
49 Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain this. Farrington 1944 and 1947 emphasized the role of technology. A contributory role for technology has also and recently been argued by Hahn 1995. I concur fully with his view of the influence of then current technology on ancient philosophers, at least in the Greek period - before the sort of attitude exhibited by Plutarch set in, and which Plutarch anachronistically attributed to earlier men about whom he wrote, e.g. Archimedes (Life of Marcellus) or Plato (Convivial Questions 8.2.1). Goody and Watt 1968 pp. 27-68 emphasized the role of literacy. Most recent views take Lloyd’s socio-political context as a starting point. Many add what might be termed cultural hybrid vigour (Sarton argued this long ago) : those living in the Ionian communities, exposed to more than one cultural influence (Greek and Lydian/Median/Persian), were presented with radically different explanations of the world. I would emphasize that this circumstance was compounded by the developing slave culture which forcibly moved and rapidly assimilated different Greeks and non-Greeks into new societies and cultures. As such, faced with a choice of different, competing, traditional, ‘received wisdoms’, they were prompted to sort and criticize them, from whatever quarter they came.
50 See e.g. the discussion about Jupiter in Seneca N.Q. 2.42-6.
51 See e.g. Topics 1.10, Posterior Analytics 1.31.
52 ‘Pedestrians’ is Saïd al-Andalusi’s translation of the term peripateic, Categories of Nations p. 29.
53 See Aaboe 1964.
54 It is quite noticeable how often ancient critics of axial rotation or heliocentric theory omit the names of Herakleides, Hiketas, Aristarkhos and Seleukos, and refer anonymously to ‘some people’ or similar such terms. Anonymity does not just affect the ‘little people’.
55 For example, the story that Solon introduced laws ‘reforming’ the coinage. Athens almost certainly did not adopt coinage until after Solon’s floruit.
56 See e.g. Boas 1959 p. 499 on Lavoisier and modern chemistry: ‘As usually happens when one examines a dramatic event in the history of science, it turns out not to have been so simple. Seventeenth-century chemists had tried to have both a rational system of nomenclature and a rational theory of combustion: had tried, and had failed’. Or Ihde’s comments on the same paper in the same book, p. 522, ‘this period [was] one which was essential for the clearing out of a great deal of rubbish which had accumulated during the previous centuries and which was serving as an obstacle to progress in chemistry. Actually a study of this period is a confusing one because, as so often happens with the clearing out of rubbish, it is not destroyed but is tossed aside where it can again serve as an obstacle to progress’. The rubbish in question is Empedokles’-Aristotle’s four- elements theory, by the way.
57 There are many examples of sevens in Greek thought: see Byl 1980 pp. 252 ff. for its appearance in Aristotle.
58 Aristotle died first (aged 60-something) whilst Theophrastos enjoyed another 30 years or so of vigorous intellectual life, continuing to study, teach, and write into his 90s.
59 Theories ‘that are now known to be false or even ridiculous’ were referred to in notes only as necessary to make sense of a passage quoted. They omitted entirely anything which ‘encroach[ed] on the field of Greek magic, superstition, and religion’ (all quotes from p. viii). Lines have to be drawn somewhere, deciding what to include and what to exclude. We would draw them differently today, and 50 years from now they would be drawn differently again. For example, a contemporary sourcebook might include as (superficially) an apparent antecedent to gene theory, Seneca NQ 3.29.3: ‘In the semen there is contained the entire record of the man to be, and the not-yet-born infant has the laws governing a beard and grey hair. The features of the entire body and its successive phases are there, in a tiny and hidden form’.
60 And the effort is very considerable. See for example Touwaide 1991. About 5% of the collection of Greek veterinary treatises which make up the Hippiatrica have yet to be edited, according to Fischer 1988 p. 195.
61 Of course it becomes necessary to explain what this theory was in order to understand reference to it (actual or implied) in passages which are selected for inclusion in the sourcebook, and Cohen and Drabkin provide such an outline in the form of notes. But they do not include any source specifically on this theory or its main ancient competitor, atomism.
62 In this respect Lewes 1864 stands apart from most scholars for his decision to retain the ‘essential or incidental absurdities’ thus ‘preserving, as far as may be, the historical colouring derived from the inherent weakness of early science and the individual weakness of Aristotle’ (p. ix).
63 For example, the competitiveness of ancient scientists and their theories, the continued inclusion of folklore within the ‘scientific’ tradition, and the status of astrology and other practices now considered occult or hokum.