1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

290 11. The Age-Long Recovery
mechanisms, too, 3 is clearly based on Hellenistic sources. page 359
All these scholars had been disciples of one master, Ammonius Hermiae
in Alexandria. Anthemius, to whom Eutocius dedicated his commentary
on Archimedes, had Isidore as a collaborator and successor. This school
had Hellenistic works unknown to the Alexandrian scholars of the first
few centuries A.D.: Diocles’ work on burning mirrors was unknown to
Pappus but is mentioned by Eutocius, and Simplicius (as we saw on page
248) is our only explicit witness about Hipparchus’ lost work on motion
under gravity. Perhaps when the cultural center of gravity shifted from
Alexandria to Byzantium — where Anthemius and Isidore, among others,
worked — scholars became acquainted with works preserved in the East
which had never been part of the Alexandrian tradition; in this connection
it is worth remarking that Simplicius, who came from Cilicia, went to
live in Persia after the Athenian philosophical school was closed by Justinian,
and that Philoponus dedicated one of his works to the Patriarch of
Antioch.
The level of scientific originality of the authors in this period is practically
nil. Eutocius’ comment on Archimedes is invaluable to us because of
its references to otherwise unknown Hellenistic mathematical works, but
it is never original. Anthemius’ treatment of conics is shabbily pedestrian
in its mathematics, when compared with Apollonius of Perga; Simplicius
gives signs of misunderstanding Hipparchus’ work. 4 However, because
works of this time contain bits of knowledge not present in surviving ear- page 360
lier sources, certain scientific and technological results have often been
dated to the sixth century. 5 Because Philoponus records the key observation
on gravity which is popularly associated with the leaning Tower of
valuable to the study of architectural history to reconstruct the ups and downs of Heron’s treatise
and Isidore’s commentary, both of which are lost. One might suspect that a Hellenistic architectural
work with a commentary by the famous architect of Hagia Sophia (a building particularly prized
for its dome) may have disappeared not when its contents stopped being of interest in Byzantium,
but when they started being of interest elsewhere. See discussion below, in particular note 25 on
page 295.
3 What survives of the works of Anthemius of Tralles can be found in [MGM].
4 For example, Simplicius, following Alexander of Aphrodisias, argues from Aristotelian natural
philosophy to criticize Hipparchus’ statement that the weight of an object decreases as it gets nearer
the center of the earth. Compare footnote 70 on page 249.
5 For example, we read in [Vogel], p. 791, that Anthemius “out-distanced Apollonius on several
points” in his work on burning mirrors. This is evidently based on a fragment that shows
Anthemius using the focal property of parabolas, which is not stated in Apollonius’ Conics. After
the publication of [Diocles/Toomer] we have proof that this knowledge goes back to Hellenistic
times, and probably was well-known to Apollonius. But it would have been enough to consider the
methodological chasm that separates the two authors to realize not only that Anthemius could not
have out-distanced Apollonius but that he could not have been the discoverer of the focal property.
On the technological side, we read in [Maier], p. 73, that Anthemius of Tralles “discovered the
principle of the steam engine”.
Revision: 1.11 Date: 2003/01/06 07:48:20