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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Understanding what is going on in most of Greek science is well within the competence of any intelligent person, as it was in antiquity. Take heart! If you read an ancient scientific text and feel, not that you are out of your depth scientifically, but more or less bewildered by the contents, then you are probably reading it through modern spectacles, so to speak. Assume always that the ancient author makes sense: what he wrote was considered sensible by enough people over enough centuries – more than a thousand years in some cases – for that text to have been repeatedly copied and thus survive for us to read now. The task then is to discover in what sense he makes sense. As Klein put it with respect to mathematics, ‘our task consists precisely in bringing the content of Greek mathematics to light not by externally transposing it into another mode of presentation but rather by comprehending it in the one way which seemed comprehensible to the Greeks’. This search for sense can apply to the structure of a work as well as its contents: our task in that case is to recognize the principle of organization at work in what otherwise appears to be a set of more or less disorganized notes, as for example in the cases of Aristotle’s History of Animals, Theophrastos’ History of Plants, or Dioskorides’ Herbal.
1 Klein 1968, reprinted by Dover 1992, p. 127.
2 Aristotle HA 584a35-bl comments on the difference in this regard between humans (variable 7-11 months) and all other animals (invariable by species); see also [Aristotle] Problems 10.41. An inscription from the healing sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus records Cleo’s five-year long pregnancy, IG 4.951. See also Pliny NH 7.40 on a Roman legal case, where the judge knew of no good cause to deny the possibility of a 13-month pregnancy, and so awarded a disputed estate to the child of a widow of that time’s standing.
3 The problem is particularly acute in mathematics; see chapter 3 below.
4 e.g. Thompson on natural history, birds and fishes in particular; Heiberg, Heath, and Thomas on Greek maths; Bailey on the chemical parts of Pliny’s Natural History; and Bennet Woodcroft, a Professor of Machinery, who became tired of waiting for some professional classicist somewhere to do Hero’s Pneumatics, and commissioned a classicist Q. Greenwood) to translate it (1851). It is still the only English translation of that work (Hall reprinted this with an introduction in 1971), and the source of almost all illustrations of Hero’s machines, which are published widely.
5 Another classicist, S. H. Weber, and a member of the Columbia University School of Mines, T. T. Read, were also involved in early stages of production of this book.
6 On which see Rottlander 1986. The team are translating Pliny into German.
7 Heilbron 1996 argues that it has almost become a necessity for the history of science to be tackled by teams of scholars, scientists, and support staff in IT etc. This is the published version of the opening address of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, March 1995. It remains to be seen if, and if so how, this programmatic statement is put into practice.
8 For example, Toynbee consulted a vet (R. Walker) for his Animals in Roman Life and Art 1973; Walker men contributed to the book an appendix on Roman veterinary medicine, pp. 303-43.
9 For example, proper attention to the historical information contained in one of Galen’s works, as well as to the MS tradition, the style, and the medical content, allowed Nutton 1997 to demonstrate conclusively that Galen died not in 199 (as traditionally believed, on the basis of an entry in the Suda), but after 204, and possibly as late as 207. An early stage of the whole process may be seen in the area of the classical tradition in Islamic sources, which are now beginning to appear in modern European language translations. For example, Saïd al-Andalusi’s The Catalogue of Nations is now available in English. The scholars who edited and translated the text are specialists in medieval Arabic, whose knowledge of classical scientific texts is limited (but my knowledge of medieval Arabic is non-existent) and whose notes to the text are correspondingly weak. But now that they have translated the text from Arabic, many others can access the text and enlarge our general understanding of it. The Arabs were not interested in Greek or Latin literature, but translated and preserved every ancient scientific treatise they could find.