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Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Influence to the Later Middle Ages.

Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Influence to the Later Middle Ages

Author	William Harris Stahl
Language	English
Subjects	History of science
Publisher	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date	1962
ISBN	9780313204739

Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Influence to the Later Middle Ages is a book by historian of science William Harris Stahl published in 1962 by University of Wisconsin Press.

Synopsis

This volume discuss the history of science in the Latin speaking West from its Greek origins to the time of the Greco-Arabic revival, focusing on the influence of Greek science in the Latin world, and on how this influence shaped both scientific education and scientific culture all the way to the middle ages.

Content

The volume follows what the author calls "the handbooks movement", the production of encyclopedic material originating with Greek authors, with a chapter devoted to Posidonius and its age, and follows this tradition among the Romans. The book has dedicated chapters on Pliny, Solinus, Chalcidius, Macrobius, Capella, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore, Bede, and other authors till about 1250, and discusses the genesis and subsequent development of the liberal arts in the Quadrivium and Trivium from the age of Plato(428-424 BC) and Isocrates(436–338 BC) till the Middles Ages and Renaissance.

The initial sections on "Classical Greek Origins" treats the discoveries of Aristarchus of Samos, Pythagora, the Sophists Hippias of Elis and Isocrates, Plato, the mathematician Eudoxus — credited with the invention of the Method of exhaustion — and Aristotle. The mathematicians Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga and Hipparchus are described in the section of the early Ellenistic tradition, together with the early botanist Theophrastus who headed the Peripatetic school after Aristotle, and Eratosthenes of Cyrenes.

Authors treated in the central section of Roman science, beside Pliny, include Cato the Elder, Cicero, Varro, Lucretius, Pomponius Mela, Vitruvius, Celsus, and Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Marcus Agrippa has a special mention for his approach of measuring the length and breadth of each province of the Roman Empire by computing distances recorded on the milestones on the imperial highways.

Nicomachus and Apuleius are treated in the chapter on the second century and the Posidonian age, while Solinus, Chalcidius, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella are treated in the chapter on Third- and Fourth-Century Cosmography.

The last part of the volume describe short period of Ostrogothic renaissance with Boethius and Cassiodorus, then moves to Isidore of Seville and Bede, and concludes with the 12th century and the School of Chartres.

The themes treated in the volume are anticipated in an article of the same Stahl published in 1959 in the journal Isis.

The author is critical of the way Roman authors treated quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) — but also geography — in their handbooks. Stahl faults the Romans and their handbooks for the low scientific level, the mechanical borrowing from one author to the next, the absence of new ideas and the instrumental use of referencing — authors citing as sources primary sources they had not read and not acknowledging the secondary sources they had read instead.

The fact that any of these handbooks, Greek or Latin, quotes an original source must never be taken for evidence that the compiler was himself acquainted with that source.

Contents

Part	Chapter
PART ONE GREEK ORIGINS	I Introduction
	II Classical Greek Origins
	III Early Hellenistic Handbok Tradition
	IV The Posidonian Age
PART TWO ROMAN SCIENCE OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE WESTERN EMPIRE	V Late Republican Times
	VI Expanding Horizons in the Augustan Age
	VII Pliny's Theoretical Science
	VIII Science in the Second Century The Posidonian Age
	IX Third- and Fourth-Century Cosmography
	X Fifth Century Neoplatonic Commentator
	XI Fifth Century Varronian Encyclopedist
PART THREE ROMAN SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES	XII Classical Learning Under the Ostrogotis
	XIII Encyclopedic Science in the Borderlands
	XIV Roman Survivals in the Later Middle Ages
	XV Conclusions

Reception

Otto E. Neugebauer faults Stahl for ignoring relevant element of Roman science: Roman calendar, the agrimensores, and authors such as Manilius and Firmicus Maternus. He is also critical of Dahl's expansive use of the term 'handbook' to cover a plurality of different typologies of works.

Funtowicz and Ravetz read in the work of Stahl a warning of how "science is an ongoing process, and not tables of enshrined truths". Thus science can degenerate to the banality and plagiarism denounced by Stahl if deprived of the stimulus of new research.

For Abraham Wasserstein the merit of Stahl work is to provide "an history and aetiology of a great failure" — that of not building on the foundations laid by their Hellenic predecessors, thus failing "the great task imposed upon them by history: to continue, develop, or at least transmit faithfully the inheritance of Greek science."