a history of science. ancient science through the golden age of greeceby george sarton

A History of Science. Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece by George SartonReview by: I. E. DrabkinIsis, Vol. 44, No. 1/2 (Jun., 1953), pp. 75-78Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/227651 .

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Book Reviews 75

AUBREY DILLER: The tradition of the minor Greek geographers. X+200 pp. (Philological Monographs, published by The American Philological Association, 14). American Philo- logical Association. Lancaster, Pa.: Lancaster Press, 1952.

Most scholars know the lesser Greek geographical texts on the basis of the edition which Charles Muller gave of them many years ago Geographi graeci minores (Paris, Firmin Didot, i855-6i), but they do not realize that the Muller collection represented an old corpus preserved more or less in MSS since the ninth century and attested indirectly in the sixth century. The tradition is now clearer than it was last century because of the discovery of a new MS, the codex Vatopedi, of which the author has made a deep study. This MS, probably written in Constantinople, is preserved in the monastery of Vatopedi on the Holy Mountain, hence its name (and its abbreviation B); it has never left the East' and hence was overlooked by earlier scholars like Muller who used the Codex Palatinus Graecus 398 of the ninth century and other MSS available in Paris; the Cod. Pal. Gr. is preserved in Heidelberg, but Muller obtained its transfer to Paris for his own collation of it. Diller's realization of the importance of B excited his interest and caused him to examine many other MSS in European libraries in 1934-36, and to investigate anew the tradition of those geographical texts. That tradition is far too complicated to be told here. It must suffice to indicate the contents of Diller's book.

Its introduction gives us in the first place an elaborate description and analysis of all the MSS, explaining the vicissitudes of each (p. 3-47). After that comes a bibliography of 452

items, arranged in chronological order, of some 230 scholars who investigated the Minor Greek Geographers from Paolo da Canale (I483-I508)

to J. Oliver Thomson (I948; Isis 41, 244). This is very interesting, except that one would have liked to have some information about those scholars, chiefly the early ones. By the way, it is sad to realize that so little is known concerning Charles Muller, who worked so much and so well. One does not even know when and where he was born and died.

The main part of Diller's work is a critical edition of the Periplus Ponti Euxini, the description of a navigation around the Black Sea. In the MS, that text bears Arrian's name in the first line, and the same Arrian dedicates it to Hadrian (emperor 117-38). On that basis, it was ascribed to Arrian (II-i), and I repeated that ascription in my Introduction (I, 285).'

1 Except 28 leaves that were stolen from it and are now in the BM, London and the BN, Paris.

2In the beautiful biography of Hadrian re- cently published by Marguerite Yourcenar: MAtmoires d'Hadrien (Paris, Plon. I95I), she

It seems clear, however, that the text is much later; it cannot be earlier than VI(2). The Periplus Ponti Euxini belonged to the old corpus such as may be found in Muller, but the editions anterior to this one were very imperfect, because the Vatopedi MS had not been used. Diller's edition of it is thus the first complete one; it is followed by reconstructions of its lost sources, the Periplus of Menippos of Pergamon as corrected by Marcian (c. 25 B.C.) and the Fragmenta periegeseos ad Nicomedem regem, derived from the Periplus of Scymnos of Chios; Scymnos wrote in prose, but the fragmenta are a summary in jambics (c. go B.C.)!. Now, these texts were also included in MUller, but very imperfectly because of the incompleteness of the main text derived from them. Diller's edition has thus the merit of cleaning up a good part of the old corpus. GEORGE SARTON

GEORGE SARTON: A History of Science. Ancient science through the Golden Age of Greece. xxvi+646 pp., 103 ills. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952. $10.00.

This volume is the first of a projected series based on the author's Harvard lectures on the history of sdence. Let it be said at the outset that the series has been most auspiciously and successfully inaugurated. The plan calls eventu- ally for eight or more volumes, with at least two devoted to each of four periods, antiquity, the middle ages, the period of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and, finally, the period from the eighteenth century to the present.

This first volume deals with the Near East and the Greek world from earliest times to the end of the fourth century B.C. Roughly a third of the book is devoted to each of the three parts, and the parts terminate with the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries, respectively.

It is interesting to compare the new volume with Dr Sarton's own Introduction to the His- tory of Science. The treatment of the same periods in volume I of the Introduction, where the subject matter is tersely summarized and bibliography predominates, is about one-eighth as long as it is in the new volume. In the latter Dr Sarton writes with unhurried fulness and with rich detail, and the treatment is a highly personal one, the fruit of a lifetime of study and teaching, and in many ways a mirror of the author's own ideals, his sympathies, his predi- lections and even his prejudices.

Readers of Isis are familiar with the very broad view that Dr Sarton takes of the history

deals with the Periplus as if it had been really addressed to him.

"If one accepts that dating, then the king to whom the poem was dedicated was Nicomedos IV, the last king of Bithynia (NW Asia Minor), who bequeathed his kingdom to Rome at his death in 74 B.C. But the poem might have been dedicated to an earlier king of Bithynia.



76 Book Reviews of science and its intimate ties with general history. They are familiar with his interest in the relations of science to philosophy, literature, art, religion, and society. They can expect that in his hands the history of science will not be a mere chronology of discoveries in the various sciences, but a history of culture with special reference to man's acquisition of systematized positive knowledge. The present volume richly fulfils this expectation and is particularly suc- cessful because it is written not only with a profound knowledge but with a profound love of Greek civilization. Together with the suc- ceeding volumes of the series, it will undoubtedly have a powerful influence in promoting the study and appreciation of this branch of human history.

Yet the very breadth of treatment, embracing all intellectual history as well as the general historical background, occasionally seems to leave no room for a full discussion of important developments that are strictly scientific. Here there is a difficulty which the historian of science must continually face, that often the best representatives of the scientific thought of a bygone age are technical works beyond the grasp of the general reader today. Dr Sarton would no doubt make a distinction, and properly so, between a general history of science, such as he is writing, and the more technical history of special sciences. Surely no one can criticize his decision to omit technical material. But the reader will sometimes fail to gain real insight into the level of achievement of ancient science.

For example, one of the high points of the scientific achievement of the pre-Greek civilization in Mesopotamia, the solution of the quad- ratic, is passed by with only the briefest mention (72). And in the Greek period, while many non-scientific writers like Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon are dealt with at considerable length, one of the greatest achievements in all ancient science, Eudoxus' generalized theory of proportion, is merely mention (443) as outstanding, without any further explanation or discussion. Similarly, considera- tions of space or technical difficulties make it necessary to curtail discussion of important scientific works like Aristotle's Meteorology (Si8).

Dr Sarton's keen historical sense enables him, in general, to assess intellectual achievement in its own context, and not on the basis of agreement or disagreement with modem knowledge or viewpoints; it enables him to see what is valuable and original in the work of the past. But like any book written from a highly individual viewpoint, this one reflects the author's personal inclinations and biases.

Philologists, especially classical philologists, who are not sufficiently acquainted with the history of science (73), or who mistake pedantry for wisdom (I4S, 348), are special objects of scorn, though Dr Sarton would be the first to admit that without the painstaking labors of

philologists his subject would simply not exist. We may merely note here the names of the nine men to whom he acknowledges (xiv) special indebtedness, the brothers Croiset, Bidez, Cumont, Wilamowitz, Paul Tannery, Diels, Heiberg, and Heath, and the man to whom the book is dedicated, Werner Jaeger.

To say (xi) that "the main misunderstandings concerning the history of science are due to historians of medicine who have the notion that medicine is the center of science" does not seem just. If physicians, on the whole, have shown a somewhat more vivid appreciation of the history of their subject than, say, physicists or chemists or biologists, it is hardly ground for censure. Certainly a more important cause of general misunderstanding of the history of science is the modern tendency to divorce hu- manistic from scientific education. And, inci- dentally, Dr Sarton has done more than anyone else I know to counteract this tendency; he has helped make the history of science the unify- ing force that it is, not only between science and the humanities, but among the various sciences themselves.

Probably the most important figures in the entire volume are Plato and Aristotle. In his treatment of Aristotle Dr Sarton is appreciative and sympathetic in the highest degree, but he is completely out of sympathy with Plato and Platonism. He finds the orderly thought of the Aristotelian treatises more congenial than Plato's dazzling interplay of ideas with their poetic color and often mystical nuances.

Especially abhorrent to him is Plato's social and political philosophy (408 ff.). The closed society, the community of wives and children, and dogmatism and authoritarianism in education -these are the aspects that Dr Sarton stresses. Humanist that he is, and inspired by a sense of the innate dignity of the individual, he is inevitably influenced in his judgment of Plato by thoughts about contemporary totali- tarianism and the issues and events of the twentieth century. In his anti-Platonism Dr Sarton supports the views so vigorously set forth in recent times by Warner Fite, Benjamin Farrington, and Karl R. Popper. "The Re- public," he says (412), "is the work of a dis- gruntled fanatic"; and, again, "I cannot explain it [Plato's community of wives and children] at all except in terms of sexual aberration."

Dr Sarton is generally careful not to judge ancient science by modern standards of knowledge and achievement, but Plato's sociological ideas receive no such objective criticism. And though the points of agreement between Plato's and Aristotle's ethics and politics are much more striking than the differences, even here Dr Sarton contrasts (57I) Plato's "blind dogmatism" with Aristotle's "sweet reasonableness." The reader will get a better balanced picture if, from Dr Sarton's chapter on Plato, he turns, for example, to F. M. Cornford's essays "Plato's Commonwealth" and "The Marxist View of



Book Reviews 77 Ancient Philosophy" in The Unwritten Philoso- phy and Other Essays.

Dr Sarton's hostility to Plato's politics makes it hard for him to deal justly with Plato's general influence on science. Thus even with regard to mathematics Aristotle is placed ahead of Plato (Soi f.). But without going into the much debated question of Plato's actual mathematical knowledge or contributions (see H. Cherniss, Review of Metaphysics, 4, 395-425, 1951, 0. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, p. 146; but contrast D. A. Steele, A Mathematical Reappraisal of the Corpus Platonicum, Scripta Mathematica I7, I73-I89, 195I), one may certainly point to the honored place that mathematics enjoyed in the Academy and the inspirational influence that Plato had on mathematicians and workers in the exact sciences not only in his own day but in all sub- sequent periods.

Was it not, in fact, Plato's love for complete abstraction from the immediately visible, his treatment of hypotheses, and his method of an- alyzing problems that made so profound an impression on Galileo (E. Cassirer, Galileo's Platonism, in Studies in honor of George Sarton, pp. 285-297) ? The Aristotelian logic of existen- tial classes, suitable though it was in some fields, e.g. biology, was far less useful for mathematics and the applications of mathematics to nature.

The equations of physics are ideal relations that are never actually realized. This fact, I believe, largely explains the fascination that Plato has often had for workers in the exact sciences. Aristotle's thought is more in touch with visible reality and to this extent is less congenial to the mathematician or the theoretical physicist. The very qualities of Platonic thought that, according to Dr Sarton (403), "allured poets and metaphysicians" could well inspire men of science from Eudoxus1 and Archytas to Galileo, Kepler, Leibniz, and their successors.

Whatever one may think of Plato's metaphysics -and Dr Sarton leaves no doubt of his own opinion when he says (p. 436, n. 06): "Plato had the impudence to make a distinction between real knowledge (derived from Ideals) and opinions (what we would call scientific knowledge) " - surely the view that Plato's theory of ideas is a bar per se to scientific knowledge (p. 403) is inadmissible.

In view of what has been said, it is no sur- prise to find the Timaeus a particular object of attack; Dr Sarton declares (p. 420) that it is, for modern men of science, "a monument of unwisdom and recklessness." Granted that the

' Dr Sarton is inclined to deny (p. 449, n. 65) that Plato set the problem traditionally ascribed to him - what uniform and ordered motions must be assumed in order that the ap- parent motions of the planets may be accounted for? Dr Sarton holds that Eudoxus, who con- tributed a solution, probably first stated the problem. I cannot agree that the tradition should so lightly be set aside.

Timaeus is a cosmological myth or allegory, not a sober scientific treatise, and that attempts to interpret it literally have often made of it either an instrument of obscurantism and irra- tionality or else an object of ridicule, still it remains a profound avowal of the teleological viewpoint. That this viewpoint has strongly influenced the development of scientific thought by suggesting provisional hypotheses (even if purpose itself has no place in the ultimate scientific formulation) is indicated most clearly by the history of biology.

In properly seeking to correct what to his mind were the extravagant claims of the Plato- nists, Dr Sarton seems to me to have gone to the opposite extreme and to have undervalued the abundance of original and fruitful insights that Western thought owes to Plato. I have dwelled on this point because it is only in his discussion of Plato that Dr Sarton has failed to give the general reader what I consider to be a well-balanced view; his evocations of the other great figures of Greek thought are generally models of sympathetic understanding and critical perception.

The author's vast knowledge of the literature of his subject, past and current, has probably reduced factual error in the book to a minimum.' This is certainly true in the limited area to which my own critical competence extends. There are, however, a few relatively minor points I would make.

P. I72. In the discussion of Old Babylonian mathematics, mention might well have been made of the tablet that gives Pythagorean triples, i.e. rational solutions of the relation c' = a'+ b' -perhaps the earliest example of what seems to be a purely theoretic interest in numbers. See Neugebauer, op. cit., pp. 35 ff., 49 ff.

P. I79. Dr Sarton himself points out (n. 4I) the ambiguity of his statement that Cleostratus (c. 520) "recognized the signs of the zodiac." But cf. further Neugebauer, op. cit., pp. 97, 133.

P. 215. Chalcidius' Commentary on the Timaeus 244 is cited for the surgical removal of the eye by Alcmaeon, but from what we know of Alcmaeon it is more likely that the reference is to anatomical dissection.

P. 275. According to Dr Sarton, one of the most striking features of early Greek mathematics is "the neglect of plain arithmetic." If that means, as the next sentence seems to imply, neglect of "ordinary methods of reckoning," the fact is hardly striking. For works on the art of calculating would not belong to the mathematical tradition proper, any more than they do today. That the Greeks turned from number

'"Inhabited" in the description of Parmeni- des' torrid zone (288) is a misprint for "unin- habited." In the geometric progression (450) for "I2"' read "27." On Greek numeration, it is stated (208) that "an odd number might end with any one of the 27 [alphabetic] sym- bols." For "odd," read "even."



78 Book Reviews

to geometric form, and in fact sought to under- stand number through geometric form, was due, at least in part, to the discovery of irrationals; no number existed for these irrationals, but they could, in certain cases, be constructed geo- metrically.

P. 354. In discussing the Hippocratic Col- lection, Dr Sarton comments on about half of the treatises. Among those omitted are De natura pueri, De semine, and De morbis IV. Yet these are especially important because they so well exemplify a systematic use of analogy, one of the major contributions of the Greeks to scientific thought (see 0. Regenbogen, Quellen u. Studien z. Gesch. d. Mathematik, Abt. B, 1930, I: 131 f.).

In view of the wealth of material that Dr Sarton has given us, it may appear ungracious to ask for more. But I feel that the book would have benefited by general discussions of the nature of scientific method as it developed in the period under discussion, of the role of analogy and hypothesis, of observation and ex- periment, and of the interplay of theory and practice or pure and applied science.

P. 376. On the puzzling passage of the Hip- pocratic Oath in which the physician abjures surgery, reference might have been made to L. Edelstein's suggestion that this provision reflects the Pythagoreanism in which the whole document is conceived (L. Edelstein, The Hip- pocratic Oath, pp. 24-30).

P. 444. It is stated (n. 45) that Ptolemy's Catalogue of Stars was not based on new observations but was merely derived from Hip- parchus' Catalogue, with the longitudes increased by a constant to take account of precession. But Ptolemy does seem to have made inde- pendent observations and to have included stars not listed by Hipparchus. See e.g. Neugebauer, op. cit., p. 69.

P. 474. Dr Sarton makes the semantic con- nection between the name of Cicero's dialogue Hortensius and that of its chief source, Aristotle's Protrepticos. But he does not point out that the Ciceronian dialogue actually takes its name from one of its interlocutors, the orator Quintus Hortensius Hortalus.

P. 5I0. The two different measurements of the circumference of the earth, 240,000 and I8o,ooo stades, ascribed to Posidonius, may not be due to two different measurements of the stade. See Isis 43, 51I, I943.

P. 56o. Theophrastus' fragment on ichthyes oryctoi is taken by Dr Sarton to refer to fossil fishes in a palaeontological sense. But is not the reference to living fish that are caught by digging? See Isis 33, 58, 1941.

P. 562. In discussing the name logicoi given by Galen and others to the physicians of the Dogmatist school, Dr Sarton suggests such meanings as "intellectual," "dialectical," and "argumentative." Perhaps the term is better understood in contrast to empeiricoi, the ad-

herents of the Empiric school. The logicoi then are those who rely on reason, logos, to infer the existence of entities not immediately observable, i.e. not subject to empeiria.

These are all minor details, as I have said, and will surely not detract from the impression of excellence that the book so emphatically con- veys. With each new contribution to his be- loved field Dr Sarton increases the debt which all present and future students of the history of civilization owe him. May he long continue to add to his already unparalleled record of achievement !

The City College, New York I. E. DRABKIN

FRANZ ROSENTHAL: A history of Muslim historiography. xii+558 p. Leiden: Brill, 1952.

Professor Rosenthal's magnum opus to which he has devoted many years of study and almost incredible labor and ingenuity is finally available and offers a rich pabulum to students of historiography and of Islam. It is so full of learning that a complete analysis of it is out of the question, and it must suffice in this review to indicate its general architecture. It is made of three parts, the first of which is what the title of the book says. The author explains the origins of Muslim historiography, the social environment which conditioned its growth, its basic forms (khabar, annals, dynastic accounts, tabaqdt, genealogies), its contents, the different kinds of writing. This covers 172 p.

Part two contains the annotated translation. of two texts of the second half of the fifteenth century, both of which were unknown to me. A short one by the Anatolian Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Kafiji (d. 1474), 14 p., and a much longer one, the "open denunciation of the adverse critics of the historians" by the Egyptian Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-RahmAn al-SakhiwT (1427-97), 250 p. Finally, the relevant extract from the Miftdk al-sa'dda of the Turkish en- cyclopaedist, Ahmad ibn Mu?taf! Tashkopruzade (d. I56I), 5 p. The l'ldn of aI-Sakh&wi is the main text, being more than twelve times longer than the two others together. It was poorly edited in Damascus 1930/3I but Dr Rosenthal has prepared his translation on the basis of the MSS available to him. Says he:

[The l'lan] was written in order to defend the study of history as an auxiliary subject in the extra- academic curriculum of religious studies. History, in this sense, preferably referred to the discussion of certain aspects of the biography of religious scholars. In fact, the work was written entirely from the point of view of the religious disciplines. However, at the same time, it was written by a man who was possessed by a passion for collecting details and who marked the end of a great era of research on the problems of the writing of history. The result was a work which constitutes a comprehensive and often brilliant exposition of Muslim historiography.



a history of science. ancient science through the golden age of greeceby george sarton

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