Contents:
Hot rocks, pearls of wisdom The science of nano-artistry Shedding light on nautical travel Romancing the Philosopher's Stone Living large, living unobtrusively Few takers for green goods Mad for more than gadgets It heals, it maddens, it mellifies corpses Final launches to remember Forget the gardens, build me a labyrinth Thales spent his life inquiring into the animating principles of the universe, the deeper nature of matter. Like other Greek seekers, he embraced learning from more ancient cultures, studying geometry and astronomy with the Egyptian sages.
With his newly won knowledge he was able to accurately predict a solar eclipse, forcing armies to cancel a perfectly good battle slated for that day. This insightful eccentric has been called the first Greek scientist. In the same era, his class act was echoed by Pythagoras, who sought answers to the universe in numbers and in music.
A Greek born on the island of Samos, Pythagoras chose to establish his community of three hundred like-minded geeks, male and female, in southern Italy. It would grow to include thousands of adherents, including his wife and daughters, and thrive for centuries. These beginnings of real science coincided with the birth of Greek philosophy, literally the love of wisdom, a framework for contemplating the "what's it all about? No one used the Latin-derived word scientist yet.
Instead, Thales and Pythagoras called themselves natural philosophers or physicists , from the Greek physika , meaning "to come into being. Whatever moniker they chose, these lovers of wisdom had a feverish curiosity about the world, seen and unseen. Philosophers from Aristotle to Zeno developed strong opinions on natural phenomena, on morality, on what constituted the good life.
Some, such as Democritus, Heraclitus, and Lucretius, explored the unseen, from germs to atoms. Others, including Empedocles and Theophrastus, did pioneering work in ecology, botany, climate, and evolution. Still others, such as Hipparchus and Anaxagoras, studied the heavens, predicting eclipses and meteor crashes, all while trying to square the circle for the first time. These early inquirers weren't confined to what we think of as Greece, either.
Syracuse on Sicily, which for five centuries rivaled Athens in size, wealth, and scientific brilliance, boasted numerous philosophers and physicists. So did Alexandria, Egypt, and Crotona, Italy. They joyously wallowed in words, sparring in debate, reading their works aloud at the Olympics and other Great Games, polishing their theories to a high gloss, and defending them in print. Their book titles sometimes all we have left of those works show the zeal of these early inquirers: Sad to say, the lottery of time bypassed Thales and others, leaving nothing of their work except excerpts and mentions in others' books.
From the intellectual framework constructed by these men and a surprising number of bold women, from Aglaonice to Arete, Hipparchia to Hypatia came vocabulary and concepts now indispensable to us: In the second century B. Ever practical, they followed the Greek model, then zigzagged in succeeding centuries to exploit technology, ignoring most efforts at pure science research.
Only a few protested the stagnation, one being Pliny the Elder, a military careerist and encyclopedist turned science buff, who would later expire from a too-close encounter with an erupting Mount Vesuvius. He denounced the anti-intellectualism of his day, saying, "In spite of official patronage, no addition whatsoever is being made to knowledge by means of original research, and in fact even the discoveries of our predecessors are not being thoroughly studied.
Strange Superstitions and Curious Customs of the Ancient World [Matheos Chrysostomou, Alicia Chrysostomou] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying. Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Alicia Chrysostomou was born in London to an Irish Strange Superstitions and Curious Customs of the Ancient World Kindle Edition. by.
At first glance, it seems clear to us why these ancient societies didn't make more scientific progress. Their dependence on an enslaved workforce, for example. Slave labor undoubtedly did undercut demand for more efficient machines and better use of draft animals. In addition, there were a surprising number of war-free years during Roman-dominated centuries. Peace created an urgent need to keep men in those huge standing armies busy with road building and other long-term projects.
Often we overlook a key fact: Most ancient literary output was written by aristocrats, who emphasized the rigid barriers between pure science and its applications. These armchair erudites would have snorted at the idea of physical proofs. Testing hypotheses, setting up experiments, getting reproducible results? Such hands-on activities were for technitai , thetechnicians—a disparaging label given to inventors as well as blacksmiths. Such writers would point to the misguided efforts of Heron of Alexandria, whose da Vinci-like ingenuity created a working prototype of the steam engine.
Like most ofhis inventions, it went nowhere. Instead, Heron's dream works largely served to amuse as toys of the wealthy, or amaze with whiz-bang special effects at the temples of one god or another. Theoretician Archimedes, the Einstein of his age, became another example. Although obliged to spend much of his time developing weaponry, he also pioneered mathematical physics while perfecting the major mechanical underpinnings of technology.
Three centuries after his death, the Greek writer Plutarch asserted that Archimedes had so despised his practical inventions that he refused to write down how they were made.
It heals, it maddens, it mellifies corpses And finally, to Rome, who in B. Item s unavailable for purchase. History and Civilization Collection. Horoscopes and other disasters
Maybe it was Plutarch who had the attitude problem. He was one of a host of historians and scientists from his time right down to ours, who admired long-ago scientific theory yet dismissed its execution. As you'll see in this book, there is growing evidence that early imagineers not only theorized but put their theories into sophisticated practice. Its very complexity implies that it could not have been the first device of its kind. But several factors did blight the full flowering of ancient science. The opposing core values held by Greeks and Romans. The real estate we call "Greece" today was once a mix of land and sea, dotted with small, wary entities called city-states.
They fought, formed alliances, and backstabbed, never forming a single nation despite their shared tongue and cultural beliefs. When city-states ran low on resources, they'd send colonizers abroad. These far-flung bits of Greekness took hold in Gaul, along southern Italy's coast, on Sicily, around the Iberian peninsula.
Thales' city-state of Miletus alone gave birth to ninety colonies. That fierce go-it-alone spirit made the Greeks vulnerable—first to Alexander the Great, then to his rapacious successors. And finally, to Rome, who in B. The Introduction better educated losers became the teachers, doctors, architects, and artisans of the winners.
Over time, countless thousands won their freedom. Respect, however, was harder to win. Elite Romans educated their sons in Athens but remained contemptuous of Greek intellectual power. Emperors like Hadrian, who appreciated Greek culture, were ridiculed for not having enough Roman gravitas. Behind his back he was called "Greekling," a tag with a tinge of slavishness that implied loser, lightweight, too artsy by half.
Small wonder, then, that few young Romans cared to seek careers in the early sciences. A second somber thread ran through Greco-Roman society, one that severely undermined attempts to find rational answers to scientific problems.
We'd call this tangled skein of beliefs superstition. The majority of ordinary folks around the Mediterranean paid little attention to scientific bulletins or philosophical pronouncements. Instead, the Greek- or Latin-speaking masses alternately marveled at the world or cursed it, shrugging off the idea of seeking to understand. Weather, the fate ofa newborn, a harvest, a journey; illness, slow death, or miraculous recovery—all events were in the laps of the gods. Nearly everyone also believed in weaver-goddesses called the Fates, picturing them as three crones spinning thread, measuring it, cutting it to end a human life.
In Latin, the root of our word destiny meant "that which is woven or bound together with threads. This universal belief in the implacability of fate meant that the game of life was fixed from the beginning. The only sensible action in the here and now was to placate the powers that be. An easy task, since the ancient world teemed with gods and goddesses, from the dysfunctional Olympians and their extramarital antics to state-endorsed patron deities, demigods, and legendary heroes who could be hit up for favors.
Deity worship eventually extended to regular humans, beginning with a dead emperor or two, followed by living ones. Slavery in Africa in the 's. A Recovered City of Alexander the Great, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind.
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