1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

174 6. The Hellenistic Scientific Method
A first cause of misunderstandings is the idea that there was such a
thing as the “Ancients”. Talk of “ancient science” — supposedly spanning
the millennium and more from Thales to Simplicius and represented by
such diverse people as Parmenides, Archimedes, the elder Cato, Plutarch
and Seneca — makes as much sense as talk of a “second millennium A.D.
science” cultivated by Thomas Aquinas, Nostradamus, Galileo, Lavoisier,
Freud and Dr. Mengele.
Lack of interest in applied science is of course documented among many
classical-era Greek thinkers (who lived before the full blossoming of the
scientific method) and among imperial-era Roman intellectuals (to whom
the scientific method remained alien). These two groups of intellectuals
share with Hellenistic scientists the label “Ancient”; if one believes in a
homogeneous attitude of the “Ancients” regarding science, one can be
tempted to reconstruct it by dismissing as unrepresentative all the true scientists
we have notice of. This misunderstanding is further compounded
by the fact that most of what we know about Hellenistic scientists comes
to us through the sieve of imperial-era writers.
The best counterexample to the idea that Hellenistic science was unconcerned
with applications is provided by Archimedes, who wrote a treatise
on mirrors and founded the science of machines; who wrote the first
theoretical treatise on hydrostatics and followed the construction of the
biggest ship of his time; who devised new machines for lifting water and
for waging war; who showed (according to tradition by means of public
demonstrations, and at any rate in his writings) how natural philosophy
could be surpassed by creating a science that, through theoretical design,
was closely linked to technology. And yet many scholars have sworn that
Archimedes was not interested in technology! Since this lack of interest page 222
is attested neither in his remaining works nor by documented facts, it is
cast in terms of an inner feeling or philosophical attitude that supposedly
caused Archimedes to carry out his numerous achievements willy-nilly.
Fraser, for instance, writes:
Archimedes had a profound contempt for applied mechanics. 84
What is this widely shared opinion about Archimedes’ hidden sentiments
based on? It is essentially pulled out of the hat of a single sentence in
Plutarch’s Parallel lives. 85 Archimedes’ feelings are thus deduced from the
84 [Fraser], vol. I, p. 425.
85 The Parallel lives is a series of biographies where each Greek character has a Roman “parallel”.
No scientists are represented, which is not surprising given that Plutarch would not have been able
to find a single Roman parallel. The statement about Archimedes that motivates Fraser’s remark
appears in the Vita Marcelli (xvii, 3–4) — that is to say, in the biography of the very Roman general
under whose watch Syracuse was sacked and its greatest scientist killed.
Revision: 1.7 Date: 2002/09/14 23:17:37