George Sarton - Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece

Copyright 1952 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Copyright renewed 1980 by May Sarton.

All rights reserved.

This Dover edition, first published in 1993, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the W. W. Norton & Co.1970 edition of the work first published by The Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1952 under the title A History of Science, Volume I: Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sarton, George, 18841956.

Ancient science through the golden age of Greece / George Sarton. Dover ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952-59.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780486144986

1. Science History. 2. Science, Ancient. 3. Civilization, Ancient. I. Title.

Q125.S238 1993

509.3 dc20

92-38351

CIP

AC

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

27495003

www.doverpublications.com

This book is gratefully dedicated

to my colleague and friend

Werner Jaeger

Many years ago, soon after the publication of volume 1 of my Introduction, I met one of my old students as I was crossing the Yard, and invited him to have a cup of coffee with me in a cafeteria of Harvard Square. After some hesitation, he told me, I bought a copy of your Introduction and was never so disappointed in my life. I remembered your lectures, which were vivid and colorful, and I hoped to find reflections of them in your big volume, but instead I found nothing but dry statements, which discouraged me. I tried to explain to him the purpose of my Introduction, which was severe and uncompromising; a great part of it was not meant to be read at all but to be consulted, and I finally said, I may be able perhaps to write a book that pleases you more.

Ever since, I have often been thinking of this book, which reproduces not the letter but the spirit of my lectures. It was written primarily for my old students and for historians of science, all of whom have been my companions as readers of Isis and Osiris, and many of whom have worked with me or helped me in various ways. It was written also for educated people in general, but not for philologists.

This requires a word of explanation. I am not hostile to philologists and am in some respects one of them, though they would probably repudiate me. Nature is full of wonderful things shells, flowers, birds, stars that one never tires of observing, but the most wonderful things of all to my mind are the words of men, not the vain multiplicity of words that flow out of a garrulous mouth, but the skilful and loving choice of them that falls from wise and sensitive lips. Nothing is more moving than the contemplation of the means found by men to express their thoughts and feelings, and the comparison of the divers means used by them from time to time and from place to place. The words and phrases used by men and women throughout the ages are the loveliest flowers of humanity. There is so much virtue in each word; indeed, the whole past from the time when the word was coined is crystallized in it; it represents not only clear ideas, but endless ambiguities; each word is a treasure house of realities and illusions, of truths and enigmas. That is why I so often pause in my thought, speech, or writing and wonder what this or that word really signifies. Such preoccupation will frequently obtrude itself in my book, especially in the footnotes, which indifferent readers can easily skip if they wish.

And yet my scientific studies have been too deep and too long to make me feel at ease with philologists, or they with me. As far as I can judge, my interest in languages is more genuine than the interest of the average philologist in science. My main regret as a teacher of ancient science is that my large audiences hardly ever included students of classical philology, and yet my course might have been a revelation to them; the probable reason for their absence was that their faculty advisers were not concerned about science, nor even about the history of science. Too bad!

The book is not written for classical philologists, but rather for students of science whose knowledge of antiquity is rudimentary, who may never have studied Greek, or whose knowledge of it was too shallow to endure. Therefore, my Greek quotations are restricted to the minimum and are always translated, and I explain many things that every philologist already knows. On the other hand, I explain scientific matters as much as can be done briefly; complete scientific explanations are out of the question, for one cannot teach science and the history of science at the same time.

My teaching of the history of science was divided into four courses, dealing respectively with antiquity, the Middle Ages, the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and the eighteenth century until now. Each of these courses extended to some 35 lectures, and its publication will require two volumes. This is thus the first of eight volumes. Each volume is complete in itself. The present one explains the development of science from the beginnings to the end of the Hellenic period.

As it took me two years to complete the full cycle of my lectures, I did not return to a definite subject, say Empedocles or Eudoxos, in a shorter interval of time. Now two years is for a wide-awake scholar a pretty long period. Many things may and do happen; memoirs and books are published that throw a new light on the subject; the very advance of science obliges one to reconsider old ideas; above all, I was changing. As a result of all this, I have never given twice the same lecture, and no lecture was ever fixed; they remained in a state of fluidity until now when the necessity of writing and printing freezes them. That freezing is very uncongenial to me, but it cannot be helped. I hope that some of my readers, at least, will unfreeze the printed words, and give a new life to them by their own critical attention.

The history of science is an immense field which it would be impossible to cover completely in a hundred or a thousand lectures, and I preferred to deal with a few selected subjects as well as possible rather than try the impossible. There is no space and time to say everything, but the selection of items is more careful and richer in this book than it could be in the spoken lectures.

For each selected topic, say Homer, it is impossible to state all the facts, nor is it necessary to do so. A few elementary things must be repeated, yet space must be kept for things that are less hackneyed and withal more important. In this I have been helped by my faith in the reader, who need not be told everything but requires only a few hints.

It is the eternal conflict between knowledge and wisdom. The known facts, the technical details, are fundamental but insufficient. They must be simplified, symbolized, and informed with a deeper understanding of the problems involved.

As I grew older my lectures became simpler; I tried to say fewer things and to say them better, with more humanity. This book continues in a different way the same evolution, but it is not yet as simple as I would have liked to make it.

Some technical questions of great difficulty have been left out, because the explanation of them to nonspecialists would have required considerable space and, what is worse, would have sidetracked their attention and diverted it from things of greater importance. The conflict between technique and wisdom existed in the past even as it does now, and there were then as now plenty of dunces who fussed about trifles and overlooked the essential.