1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

8.2 Rome, Science and Scientific Technology 205
8.2 Rome, Science and Scientific Technology
What was Rome’s attitude toward science? To give an idea of the level of
Roman interest in the scientific method, it may suffice to recall that the
first Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements seems to have been Adelard’s:
the year was around 1120 and Adelard was an Englishman (from Bath)
translating from the Arabic. 18
When Varro lists in his agricultural manual earlier treatises on the subject,
he says that Theophrastus’ writings are not so much for people who
care to cultivate land but for those who want philosophical learning. 19
Why were the Greek scientist’s books, which contained besides much else
principles on which viticulture was reformed throughout the Hellenistic
world, 20 labeled as philosophical texts with no practical utility? Evidently
because Theophrastus talks of theories. Varro, probably the most erudite
of Romans, is turned off by such things, which he does not understand. He
classes their content with the only “theory” whose existence he’s aware of:
philosophy.
Varro represents a prescientific culture, to which science was utterly page 258
alien. By contrast, later Roman writers like Pliny or Seneca are fascinated
by Hellenistic scientific works: they cannot follow the logic of the arguments,
but nonetheless admire their conclusions, precisely because they
appear unexpected and marvelous. These authors try to emulate their
models while eliminating the logical connecting threads or replacing them
with ones which, though arbitrary, are easier to visualize and so lead faster
to the desired result, the wonderment of the reader. This contact with the
results of a science whose methodology remains impenetrable then has
the glaring effect of causing faith in common sense — a quality that earlier
writers like Varro did not lack — to be jettisoned.
Pliny twists his sources to such an extent that it is difficult to recognize
even known information. An example:
Some beasts of burden suffer from eye disease when the moon waxes.
But only man is freed from blindness upon the emission of fluids.
After twenty years [of blindness] sight has been restored to many. . . .
The great authorities say that the eyes are linked to the brain through
18 See, for example, [Euclid/Heath], or www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~ history/Mathematicians/
Adelard.html. For the bigger picture, see [Stahl], an amusing book that makes patent the nonexistence
of “Roman science”.
19 “. . . non tam idonei iis qui agrum colere volunt quam qui scholas philosophorum” (Varro, De
re rustica, I, v, 1–2).
20 See pages 219–220.
Revision: 1.4 Date: 2002/07/12 23:34:21