7. “The Base Mechanic Arts”?

Some Thoughts on the Contribution of Science (Pure and Applied) to the Culture of the Hellenistic Age

K. D. White

My first task must be to remove some misapprehensions and dispose of some widely held but erroneous notions about ancient science and technology. For example, we are frequently told that the Greeks had no word for science, as we understand that term. But they did have a word, historia, and even if we do not think much of Herodotus' pioneering “inquiries,” it would be a bold man today who would deny the title of “scientific inquiry” to Theophrastus' Inquiry into Plants (Peri phyton historia), a work which laid the foundations of the science of botany. As for technology, it is surely time we stopped equating the term with mechanical inventions, or labeling applied scientists such as Philo of Byzantium with the obsolete term “mechanicians.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary, even in its second edition, has no entry for technology, or for Ktesibios, while the hundred professors of the Museum are described, s.v. “Museum,” as “research scholars.” I think we must try to steer a middle course, somewhere between Finley's view of the ancient Greeks as “desperately foreign” ^[1] and the misguided notion that they were really “fellows of another college.” ^[2]

Next, we have to dispose of some of the presuppositions encountered by those who embark on research in this area. They include the “Farrington heresy,” which argues that everything in philosophy and science was going along swimmingly, following the pioneering enterprises of the Ionian physikoi, until Plato came along and spoilt it all with his insistence that (1) the prime aim of philosophy was not the investigation of nature and the cosmos but the acquisition of virtue, and (2) that epistemology must be based on the theory of Forms.^[3] Farrington's thesis, for which there was little evidential backing, exercised considerable influence over an earlier generation; the discrediting of some of his ideas has led to the neglect of the more positive aspects of his work, especially his views on the relationship of the Museum at Alexandria to the Lyceum and on the work of Strato of Lampsacus and Philo of Byzantium in relation to the use of experiment in science and technology, respectively.^[4] Particularly relevant to our discussion are Farrington's analyses of Strato's work on motion and on the compression of air.^[5] It is worth noting here that many of the devices invented by the mechanikoi of the Hellenistic Age were powered by compressed air, such as Ktesibios' water organ (see figure 35)—a point still ignored by most of those who write about the power resources of the ancient world.^[6]

Fig. 35.Reconstruction of Ktesibios' water organ. From K. D. White, Greek and Roman Technology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), p. 173, pl. 177. Reprinted by permission.

Our second presupposition is very deep-seated and has been made more difficult to dislodge since the late Sir Moses Finley lent the weight of his authority to it: the view that the economies of the classical world were undeveloped, their power resources very limited, and their technology primitive, with virtually no inventions and little in the way of innovation or development.^[7] In my Greek and Roman Technology (1984) I tried to review the evidence on several aspects of this central question regarding the range and importance of these technical developments, an area in which Hellenistic innovations were, in my opinion, of prime importance. Indeed, more than a decade ago the first holder of a Chair of Ancient Philosophy and Science at Cambridge, Geoffrey Lloyd, at the end of a chapter on applied mechanics and technology in this period, noted the ingenuity with which the writers on mechanics thought up new applications of a limited number of simple mechanical principles, the interest they displayed in the theoretical aspects of mechanics, and their recognition of the possibilities of applying mechanics to practical purposes, as well as to those of entertainment and miracle working.^[8]

A few years later my former colleague at Reading, John Landels, produced in his book Ancient Engineering a lucid series of expositions, aided by diagrams, to demonstrate how many of the technical devices actually worked. In spite of this, G. E. M. de Ste Croix two years later described the Greek world as “very undeveloped technologically, and therefore infinitely less productive than the modern one” ^[9]—a statement that might have carried more weight with the removal of the adverb “infinitely.” In support of this bold assertion he refers to the absence of so simple a device as the wheelbarrow—though this also failed to get invented throughout the Middle Ages, a period which is alleged to have witnessed a series of great technical advances,^[10] including the stern-post rudder for ships, a device in no way superior to the steering oars of the classical world.^[11] In fact, as I hope to demonstrate, the Hellenistic Age saw a variety of technical inventions and developments, as well as significant advances in theory and methodology, including, for example, the introduction of experiment to test a theory. Rather than engage in such sterile wranglings as those I have described, I propose to examine what evidence we have about scientists and engineers, their operations, and their role in the society of Hellenistic Alexandria.

Our sources of information consist of (1) the surviving written works of practicing scientists, both pure and applied, and (2) any technical devices which may be reasonably attributed to named inventors, such as Archimedes' screw and the Ktesibian machine. As far as written sources are concerned, our main difficulties arise from loss of the actual writings; thus, whereas the pioneering works of Theophrastus, which laid the foundations of the science of botany, survive in considerable quantity, those of Strato of Lampsacus, Theophrastus' successor as head of the Lyceum (c. 285–268), survive only in fragments cited by later authorities, from which his ideas—which covered a wide variety of subjects, including zoology, pathology, psychology, and technology—have to be pieced together. As for the technical inventions and innovations, it is, in many cases, difficult to establish either dates or attributions. Thus the water-lifting device known to the Greeks as the cochlea, or snail, may very well have been invented by Archimedes, though the attribution cannot be proved; and the double-action force pump known to antiquity as “the Ktesibian device” may well have been invented by that talented engineer, Ktesibios. This twin-cylinder pump was employed for a wide variety of practical purposes, ranging from pumping out the bilges of merchant ships to fire fighting;^[12] an eight-cylinder version was still used by the London fire brigade, and perhaps by its New York counterpart, well into the nineteenth century. Surviving specimens of the device—one of the more than twenty that have been located is illustrated in figure 36—have been collected, described, and classified for the first time, as recently as 1981, by an undergraduate student of University College, London.^[13]

Fig. 36.Ktesibian water pump from Silchester, England. From K. D. White, Greek and Roman Technology (London: Thames and Hudson), p. 16, pls. 4–5. Reprinted by permission.

Regarding the important question of contemporary attitudes toward the Hellenistic world, and toward the forces that were thought to operate within it, the following passages, which may reasonably be attributed to Strato, are highly significant. The first occurs in Cicero's De Natura Deorum (1.13.35): “Strato the physicist was of the opinion that all divine power resides in nature, which is a power without shape or capacity to feel, containing in itself all the causes of coming-to-be, of growth, and of decay.” The opinion expressed here springs from a worldview totally opposed to the prevailing Aristotelian view. Final causes in nature are out; nor is there any place in Strato's world for divine providence. Further, when he turned from theory to the investigation of physical phenomena, it seems clear that Strato endeavored to solve his problems by means of experimentation. The orthodox view on this question appears in a review of Farrington's Greek Science. Dismissing the author's claim that Strato both understood the need for experimentation and practiced it, the reviewer writes: “Experimentation as a systematic theory was unknown to antiquity, arriving only with the Renaissance.” ^[14] There are, in fact, two passages by Strato which contain descriptions of a range of devices operated by compressed air, and which are crucial to the question. How far did Greek scientists carry out experiments designed to test hypotheses?

The first passage comes from Strato's treatise On Motion, as quoted by Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics (916.10ff.), where the topic under discussion is the phenomenon of acceleration in falling objects. Simplicius noted that writers on the subject offer different explanations, but that few advance any proof of the fact that falling bodies, as they approach their destination, move faster. Strato, however, does just this. As Geoffrey Lloyd makes clear,^[15] the importance of our text lies not in what the writer is trying to prove, but in the way he sets out to attempt the proof. He first uses a simple observation, of rainwater falling off the roof of a building; he then goes on to explain what would happen if a given weight of water were dropped from different heights. We cannot in this case prove actual experiment, but in our next passage (Hero Alex. Pneum. 1.16.16ff.) we certainly can. Here the topic is one that had been much debated—that of the existence and the nature of the void (to kenon) or vacuum. Hero describes the apparatus used; it is designed to show by experiment that (1) there are scattered vacua in the air, and (2) that air can be evacuated from a sealed globe-shaped container.

We come now to the second of our Hellenistic scientists, Philo of Byzantium, who worked in Alexandria around 200 B.C. Philo is one of several writers on technical subjects who are known to have had practical experience in one branch of applied science or another, as well as being connected with the Museum or research institute established by Ptolemy Philadelphus; Philo's work was concerned with artillery, comprising mechanical arrow-firing catapults and stone-throwing ballistas. The stages of technical innovation and development in this field are well documented by a series of important finds, which include an artillery repair shop at Ampurias in Spain.^[16] However, the most important fact revealed by recent research is the indication of repeated experiment as a means of establishing a method and a formula to be incorporated in the specification for the construction of different types of missile launchers.^[17] Surely we have a clear indication that engineers in Philo's time were well aware of the need for systematic testing in order to isolate the relevant variables and determine their relationship. Philo in this passage evidently rejects the crude trial-and-error approach, along with a priori dogmatism, in favor of controlled experiment.

While Philo's name is associated with a variety of writings on scientific subjects, that of Ktesibios is linked with an equally wide range of inventions, most of which are based on the application of the principles of hydraulics. Little is known of the life of this outstanding technologist; but his lowly birth (his father was a barber) did not prevent him from enjoying royal patronage. His inventions included—in addition to the twin-cylinder water pump—a water clock, a pipe organ powered by an ingenious combination of water and compressed air,^[18] and an improved catapult, operated by bronze springs instead of twisted animal sinew. He is also credited with a considerable number of inventions designed for entertainment, the so-called automata. These included a singing cornucopia, incorporated into the funeral monument erected by Ptolemy Philadelphus in honor of his wife and sister Arsinoë; and a cam-operated statue of the mysterious deity that figured prominently in the famous Grand Procession, where it carried out a continuous performance, entertaining the festival crowd by standing up and sitting down.^[19] The excitement produced by this very simple application of a rack-and-pinion gear may well be due to the fact that toothed gear wheels were a recent invention, which almost certainly meant that their possibilities were still being explored (there is a passage in the Problemata in which the author finds the reverse motion created by two intersecting cogwheels intriguing).

It is an easy step from the most famous inventor of his day (and presumably a very well-known figure in Alexandrian society) to the Museum with which he was associated. An impressive bibliography can be readily built up on this topic, but the material available about its working conditions and its environment is very limited. The House of the Muses was evidently a research organization, supported, like the Library, by a royal endowment. Traditional accounts of these cultural developments,^[20] based as they are on the very limited accounts that have come down to us, assume that the Library, which rapidly acquired a worldwide reputation, was separate from the Museum; but it is more likely that both were parts of what might be called a research institute, which provided facilities for workers in a wide variety of disciplines belonging to what we would now call the humanities and the sciences. The House of the Muses housed and maintained an undetermined number of professors.^[21] They were accommodated in a communal establishment, which might properly be described as collegiate since they enjoyed a common table along with the environmental benefits of a garden and the shady colonnaded walks that linked the different centers of activity. In addition to the Library, these also included a theater, which provided the accommodation needed for lectures.

As for research, tradition has tended to overemphasize the importance of the work performed in the Library, which laid the foundations of textual criticism, at the expense of the investigations associated with those various branches of pure and applied science for which the Museum became famous. A more balanced judgment informs the following comment by a recent historian of Hellenistic Egypt: “There is virtually no area of intellectual activity to which [the Alexandrian scholars and scientists] did not make a major contribution and in several spheres [Alexandria's] role was paramount.” ^[22] Contrary to the commonly held opinion that under Rome the Museum and Library suffered a rapid decline into total obscurity, we have evidence that both were still operating many centuries later, even if not as vigorously as in their heyday; for Ammianus tells us that when he paid a visit to Alexandria (? c. A.D. 363) he found the arts and sciences still being pursued;^[23] they included music, geology, astronomy, and, perhaps not surprisingly, astrology. Medicine was in the most flourishing condition of all the sciences there, enjoying such a high reputation that the only qualification an intending practitioner needed to produce was a statement that he had received his training in Alexandria. The most important scientific advances seem to have been made in pure mathematics, mechanics, physics, geography, and medicine. Considering the nature of the contributions made in modern research institutions, it is not surprising to learn that at Alexandria systematics and taxonomy were to the fore in many subjects, with Euclid's Elements as the most obvious example; nor that research in both pure and applied science was being pursued under the same roof, and in a number of outstanding cases, such as that of Archimedes of Syracuse, by the same person. This eminent scientist lived and worked in Alexandria, and while based there was thought to have invented the water-raising device that bears his name.

Snobbery and place seeking are common to a wide variety of societies; widespread too is the notion, enshrined in the word banausos and its derivatives, that those who work with their hands—applied scientists and engineers no less than those who earn their bread in the lowly confines of the workshop—are inferior to theorists. Attitudes vary widely toward different occupations: metallurgy has always been surrounded with an aura of mystery, and its products, like the Shield of Achilles, regarded as somehow miraculous—thauma idesthai in Homer's phrase. But what about the status of those who practiced both pure and applied science?^[24] The passage usually cited in support of the “banausic theory” (Plut. Marc. 17) must surely be viewed in its historical context: Plutarch was no engineer but a pious country gentleman, and indeed somewhat addicted to Platonism. He is doubtless correct in suggesting that Archimedes valued his mathematical works above everything else. But how can we accept the statement that Archimedes—the inventor of the device which became so common in the complex irrigation systems of the Nile Delta that the papyri usually refer to it simply as mechane, “the machine,”—positively disliked “every art that serves the needs of everyday life?”

This is perhaps an appropriate signal to bring the present discussion to a halt, though not, I trust, to an end. I have missed out whole areas of investigation—notably medicine and astronomy—but I hope I have succeeded in establishing the need for unbiased enquiry into the science and technology of the Hellenistic Age, the activities of the scientists and engineers who lived and worked in the period, and their place in the society in which they flourished.

Response: John Scarborough

Since its publication in 1970, I have been delighted to recommend Kenneth White's Roman Farming, the best account in any modern language of that most basic of ancient—and modern—human activities, agriculture. White's book remains a pioneering tome on the topic, reminding us of why the Romans would enshrine their curiously anachronistic farming virtues as a continuous theme in their literature, ranging from Cato the Elder's blatant denarius-grubbing advice manual on farming through some oddly reminiscent data on wine-stomps, bees and honey, and cattle diseases in the Byzantine Geoponica of the tenth century.^[1] White represents the rarest of breeds in the field of history of science, technology, and medicine: a hands-on man, one who has delighted in the dirt and mud (let alone the questions of soils and their mineral variants) which always form the essence of farming. In his writing about ancient farming and technology he asks, again and again, the basic question, What is it? And in his deliciously technical manuals on Roman agricultural implements,^[2] he shows just what plows and pruning hooks, axes and hoes were, besides furnishing technological data on how such presumably lowly objects were made, by whom, and where.^[3]

Extending his scope, but employing the same essential questions, White produced the fundamental Greek and Roman Technology,^[4] a book which indeed supersedes almost every work on the subject which preceded it,^[5] yet specialist scholars appear not to have discovered how this volume also represents a major advance in the study of classical technology and science as a whole. Perhaps Kenneth White makes some scholars a bit uncomfortable with his clarity, with his insistence on reading the ancient texts on technologies for what they actually say, not what we expect or hope they might say in light of modern fads, whether Marxist, deconstructionist, or whatever. Crusty farmer and traveler that he is, White can easily sniff at the fancies of Farrington,^[6] chastise moderns who would falsify ancient technologies in their attempts to formulate sweeping explanations of insoluble historical problems,^[7] and generally chuckle at some of the inanities of writers who display their booklearning but not their command of how cogs and plowshares might actually work, or how the practice of medicine is always more than lofty theory and ideal conditions. White's maxim is “go and look.” Simple. Direct. Difficult, but ultimately rewarding.

It seems to me that White has defined (perhaps unwittingly, but with unerring instincts) exactly why technology remains the province of nonhumanists, who are supposedly—or so we are repeatedly informed—the less-than-learned folk of our day: the engineers, the technocrats of various descriptions. Are they really so ignorant? Many, indeed, cannot write plain English; but similar qualities of proud fuzziness are common among the nonscientists, many of whom writhe happily in the slippery grip of in-house specialist jargon. Perhaps White is implicitly challenging these ordinary assumptions (that humanists can think and nonhumanists cannot) when he considers just what technology in antiquity—and by extension in modern times—might actually have been. We are told that technology (broadly conceived) is applied science, so that whereas physics and pharmacokinetics in the laboratory are not technology, atomic energy and bottles of aspirin are. Or are they? Does theory precede application? White answers, “Sometimes,” thus indicating why he engenders discomfort among simplistic seekers of systematics.

Technologies in the Hellenistic world were as varied in their own way as are ours, and one learns that if experiment is taken as a criterion for science and technology, then ancient science as a whole will rarely measure up to modern standards. Note that Kenneth White confronts this misapplication of historical analogy, even while he makes careful and precise observations on how the ancients did conceive of experiment; not only did Greek and Hellenistic scientists look for repeated instances in nature to suggest analogues in technology (as in the case of dripping rain applied to ballistics), but one has clear evidence that experiment was well known to Greek and Hellenistic science, even while antiquity allowed for variables such as modern science denies in advance. Continually implied in White's published scholarship and in his present paper is a simple if often ignored fact demonstrating the absolute difference between Greco-Roman and modern science. “Experiment” to us almost always means controlled experiment (laboratories, again); but to an Erasistratus, this would have been cheating, no matter what modern microbiologists might say about the essential techniques embodied in Koch's postulates.^[8] It is thus arguable that ancient, as opposed to modern, “experiments” assumed natural variables; this also suggests why modern laboratory experiments on animal and human physiology turn out results which cannot predict exactly what will happen in the real world.^[9] The reason, quite simply, is because controlled conditions are almost never the same as those that apply in the world at large—even in carefully monitored surgical theaters, such as those in which organ transplants take place.

Yet this unlimited variability never has prevented ancients or moderns from “going and looking”: results in real science—ancient or modern—are frequently unpredictable, a fact quite invisible to chemistry students who might not progress beyond the cookbookery of freshman chemistry or the presumed invariabilities of the Krebs Cycle which explains human metabolisms.

Hands-on historians of science, technology, and medicine always seem to savor the evidence of the texts, so I am assuming Professor White will appreciate the introduction into this response of an experiment in Hellenistic times, an experiment fairly widely known by specialists in Hellenistic medical studies, but one which generally is misunderstood. The experiment is detailed in the Anonymus Londinensis,^[10] parts of which probably incorporate the lost Iatrika of Meno,^[11] a student of Aristotle who compiled opinions (doxai) of various medical thinkers and philosophies. In the version we have are various opinions of famous physicians and philosopher-physicians with the latest name dating to about 100 B.C., which suggests that we have an augmented and edited text of Meno plus more doxai added later for this private copy.^[12] Here indeed is Hippocrates, a figure who has received too much attention from students of Hellenistic medicine,^[13] as well as several other luminaries of medicine in the Hellenistic era, including one of the brilliant experimenters at the Alexandrian Museum, Erasistratus:

Erasistratus too tried to prove the proposition [i.e., that continuous, invisible emanations or evaporations of the finer elements within the body occur from the entire body without any external cause]^[14]. If one were to take some suitable animal (a bird, for example), and were to set it down in a cauldron for some period of time without giving it food, and then were to weigh it along with the excreta that visibly have been passed, one will find that it is far less in weight because obviously a considerable emanation has taken place, perceptible only to reason.^[15]

Professor White has rightly emphasized the connections between the notions of a vacuum as taught by Strato^[16] and the concepts assumed by Erasistratus in “explaining” blood in the arteries observed when one of these large vessels has been severed (synastomoses thus must exist between arteries and veins).^[17] If Alexandrian technologists could devise machines which employed compressed air and the principles of an artificially produced vacuum, then certainly the same principles could easily be applied to investigations of what we call physiology. But exactly what were Strato, Ktesibios, Philo—and Herophilus and Erasistratus—actually using as basic premises? Or more pertinently, what questions and/or assumptions guided inquiry (historia) in the most basic sense of that term?

One may begin, as does Professor White, with Theophrastus' masterpiece, the Inquiry into Plants, known usually by its Latinized title, Historia plantarum. Probably set down about 300 B.C., Theophrastus' Inquiry uses Aristotle's concepts of a morphological structure in nature to classify plants according to shape, providing the best botanical morphology and taxonomy until Carl Linnaeus' Species plantarum of 1753.^[18] In nine books,^[19] Theophrastus' inquiries incorporated all sorts of information, ranging from the experiences of professional rhizotomoi and semiprofessional pharmakopolai to his own observations (known to farmers, naturally) of growing seasons, fruits, flowers, properties of plant products (including those called pharmaka),^[20] and—most importantly for consideration here—how plants fit into the world of nature (physis) as a whole. Questions of “life” as movement and change receive Theophrastus' brilliant modifications as he shows that such movement and change is obviously very slow by comparison to Aristotle's notion of kinesis,^[21] but that plants form an essential part of a philosophical view of nature, more completely demonstrated by Theophrastus in his Causes of Plants (again known most commonly by its Latinized title, De causis plantarum).^[22] In the Inquiry into Plants one finds botanical classifications, specific identities, and informational data as Theophrastus was able to gather them; in Causes, one receives an account of common and distinct characteristics of plants. Theophrastus' two works on botany function for plants as had Aristotle's six works for animals (his Inquiry into Animals gathered information and offered a classification of animals; Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals, Motion of Animals, On the Soul, and the shorter tracts called Parva naturalia all investigated common or distinctive characteristics). Assumptions in Theophrastus' works on botany are those of a Peripatetic world view, structured and related by form and function, and were quite scientific enough to remain the best books on botany until the European Enlightenment.

Much of Theophrastus' information on plants is from the world of “base” and “mechanical” learning, to use the phraseology of Professor White. Such data—like those of experts on ballistics or the facts recorded by inventors of gadgets, toys, and even the famous water raiser called the Archimedean screw^[23]—emerge from the usually unwritten levels of a practical technology, not necessarily guarded as trade secrets (although many would be technai, along with the skills of medicine and surgery), but known and passed down from generation to generation. Theophrastus' rhizotomoi of book 9 of the Inquiry into Plants are as skilled as the assumed metallikoi of his undeservedly understudied tract On Stones^[24]—here are miners, to be sure, but also gem gatherers; and the tract addresses the basic questions of how things dug up from the earth took form initially (Theophrastus, following Plato and Aristotle, seems to believe that what we call “metals” came from water, and “earths,” that is “mined earths,” came from earth). I am quite fond of Theophrastus' short work On Odors,^[25] which is very likely a surviving part of the lost book 7 of Causes of Plants; in Odors the technology of mixing perfumes and medicinal oils indicates skills which fuse with the skills related to olive oil.^[26] Shelf life was certainly important; but, more essentially, Theophrastus wrestles with questions of smell and taste as sense perceptions which would enable Greek consumers to tell, rather precisely, good stuff from bad stuff. Philosophy's questions about higher sensations are applied to mold understanding of why some oils are better as media for certain ointments; and the common technologies of cheese making can be used to classify good cheeses by their rennets,^[27] a technology derived from venerated farm lore. And when one reads about an effective fire extinguisher made from egg whites and vinegar,^[28] one cannot escape the impression that Theophrastus' sources of information (in this case for the brief work On Fire) included practical experiments by military technologists. Theophrastus is indeed a scientist by whatever definition, but his premises are of his age, not those of botanical taxonomists, engineers, and physicists of the twentieth century.

Professor White makes the essential point—not strongly enough in my view—that the research at Ptolemaic Alexandria was less a matter of technology than of scholarship, assisted by a library which supposedly contained all of the best works of Greek learning, from Homer to Hippocrates. Yet this library needs to be understood for what it was: a collection of literature from which resident savants could and did make scholarly commentary. To put it another way, scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria were devoted mainly to philology; perhaps this explains why the weird and often internally contradictory collection we know as the Hippocratic corpus should ever have been called “Hippocratic” at all.^[29] Libraries mean librarians, and librarians mean catalogues,^[30] and it became customary after about 250 B.C. to compile pinakes of subjects almost as a literary form, so that oddments such as Phlegon's Marvellous Events,^[31] while purportedly deriving their learned pinax form from pseudo-Aristotelian matter under titles such as “Marvellous Things Heard,” ^[32] soon became listings of curiosa for their own sake.^[33] Science? Of a kind, if classification in its most rigid definition is assumed.

Strato and Ktesibios may have theorized, and their followers devised, machines, perhaps to demonstrate how false in the so-called real world were Aristotelian concepts of motions (i.e., in simple physics); but one needs occasionally to be reminded that Greco-Roman science sought solutions to problems far different from those that moderns take for granted. The Greeks and their Roman successors certainly practiced science; but in no wise did they ever think in terms of atoms, subatomic particles, and molecules—terms characteristic of physics and chemistry only since Rutherford and Einstein, and especially since Crick and Watson's double helix of 1953. Nor did the ancients assume exact measurement to be absolutely essential, as do modern biochemistry and pharmacology. In fact, not only were the questions of Greco-Roman science generally founded on an interplay between philosophical premises (whatever the brand of philosophy) and technological tradition, but sometimes the older traditions of empirical (or experiential) data were employed to “explain” what the philosophers taught. Small wonder that John Riddle thinks of Dioscorides' Materia medica as a millennia-old summation of precise pharmacology;^[34] and when one considers Lynn Thorndike's not yet widely accepted thesis of magic (and yes, throw in astrology and alchemy, too) as the origin of modern science,^[35] one is immediately struck by the contrast with the questions—and their assumed answers—in ancient science as a whole.

Particularly satisfying was the earlier Greek notion of elements (finally reduced to four), their qualities (also four), and—for humans, animals, and plants—the semicanonical four humors first lucidly argued by the author of the Hippocratic Nature of Man.^[36] This tripartite theoretical perception of the living biological universe was good enough to explain almost everything until 1787, when, in a famous demonstration, Lavoisier proved that water was not an element. The Greco-Roman theoretical description using elements, qualities, and humors had incredible lasting power. Quantities in such a system were almost irrelevant if an ideal balance (viz. a krasis for the doctor's four humors) was more or less presumed; so that when simple mechanical devices like Herophilus' pulse counter (a portable clepsydra) appeared,^[37] the measurement of pulse rates simply was used as part of a preconceived diagnosis. Greek medicine had classified numerous fevers, so that when Praxagoras (a generation before Herophilus) discovered how pulse rates were related to disease and how pulsation characterized arteries, the “new device” merely refined assumed diagnostics. Naming specific pulses engaged Herophilus' fertile mind, blessed as it was with facility in analogy and exactly appropriate associations: his myrmekizon, “crawling like an ant,” or dorkadizon, “leaping like a gazelle,” ^[38] among other invented terms to describe abnormal pulses, were colorful and vivid, but they were simply another aspect of fevers already described. The evidence of a “gazelle pulse” simply refined which fever was in question.^[39] Machines and medicine were seldom in partnership in Greco-Roman medicine, though there are exceptions: the racks and pulleys which painfully reset some fractures and dislocations,^[40] and the technologically remarkable specula, surgical scalpels, dissection hooks, and needles (both fake and real), widely known in museum collections.^[41] Even in military matters technologists improved slowly upon earlier designs of ballistic machines; pneumatic principles were recorded by Vitruvius and later Roman writers, but the infrequent use of such principles suggests a conservative attitude on the part of military authorities—quite similar in this to authorities in medicine. Innovation, then and now, in both fields, is almost always defined as dangerous.

And yet we see Strato, Ktesibios, and Philo pushing, as it were, at the boundaries of their technologies. Why not improve the capacity of springs by changing from hair to bronze? The crossbow would emerge many centuries later from a miniaturization of this idea. Why not exploit the artificial production of a partial vacuum (something not found in nature)? Or more to the point of Alexandrian science as a whole, why not test the hypothesis of Aristotle's “intelligent heart” by looking to see just what the head contains (to test the opposite notion descended from Plato), just what the heart really does, and how it actually appears in the human body? Would structure suggest function? Aristotle thought so, much as he argued for the oddly formed entoma which jointedly wiggled, wobbled, and buzzed everywhere.^[42] So also we see that the burning question for anatomists and physicians in Hellenistic Alexandria was one formulated in the matrix of philosophy: Does the head rule, or does the heart?

Once again, that Tiber frontier looms in our analysis. Almost everything we know about Alexandrian medicine and physiology (excepting Nicander, with whom I will close my brief remarks—and he is not Alexandrian anyway) comes through the filter of Roman writers: Celsus in the reign of Tiberius;^[43] Rufus of Ephesus, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, and some bits in Soranus of Ephesus in the early second century;^[44] the diarrhea-of-the-pen Galen of Pergamon (A.D. 129–after 210);^[45] and Caelius Aurelianus of probably about A.D. 400.^[46] These are our major texts and authors for information about Hellenistic Alexandrian medicine, anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and some small specifics on surgery. Celsus and Caelius Aurelianus are in Latin, the rest in a high-flown and artificial Greek, sometimes openly imitative of the “best” medical writer, Hippocrates.^[47] Galen especially is part of that dreary revival of the fourth-century-B.C. Greek called, charitably, in its second-century-A.D. Roman counterpart, the Second Sophistic.^[48] Yet the Romans did pick out the basic methods, assumptions, and results of the work performed by Herophilus (about 280 B.C.) and Erasistratus (about 260 B.C.): they both dissected human cadavers;^[49] and they both made anatomical discoveries which formed the basis of what was known of internal anatomy until late medieval times. Maybe what they found was sufficient. Cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla oblongata, neura going all over the body: Herophilus. The brain ruled. Or did it? What were these “white sandal-thongs?” And why were two of them crossed (chiasma) before they entered the eyes? Were tendons and nerves the same? What of the internal structure of the human female? Uterus and other parts? Were they truly analogous to male structures? Were the older theories right regarding conception? Seeds and soil? Hot seeds making baby boys? Did dissection answer the old questions? In a way. The brain was complicated, the cerebrum of man was fuller of ridges and creases (convolutions) than comparable cerebra in sheep, goats, and such. Higher intelligence explained now by more diffuse convolutions? Perhaps. And blood? One found blood in dissection only in the veins: Erasistratus.

It was not until Galen's simple double-ligation demonstration, recorded in his Blood in the Arteries,^[50] that one knew blood was in the arteries of a living human being. And even earlier, strict thinkers could easily criticize results obtained from animal dissections as not applying to man, even by analogy. Yet Galen's genius as a comparative anatomist recognized similar genius in Aristotle's work—so Galen stuck by his guns, and analogy was the watchword in anatomy until the Renaissance. In some senses, human dissection did not tell very much about human existence (except for better descriptions of the actual parts and of their relationships one to another) not already intuited previously. Pulse lore was sophisticated before the Museum was established, and since quantitative notions were not particularly valued it did not occur to either Erasistratus or Galen that a closed circulation might explain the functions and forms of both heart and vessels. So analogy remained, and was satisfying, for almost two millennia.

Finally, I will illustrate the “base mechanic arts” thesis by considering Nicander of Colophon (fl. c. 130 B.C.), whose poems, Theriaca and Alexipharmaca, have survived almost intact.^[51] Farm lore on spiders, scorpions, insects, toads, poisons, and antidotes, all put into poetic hexameters. Homeric hexameters. Nicander, of course, was compelled to coin words to ensure correct scansion, with the result that these two poems were a miserable hodgepodge of half-recognizable and sometimes freshly invented words which caused even the ancient scholiasts to scratch their skull.^[52] But two factors stand out regarding these poems, which became standard textbooks on toxicology: first, one could memorize them easily, since Nicander's poetic techniques for coining epithets mimicked Homer rather precisely; second, one could take pride in recognizing all those Homeric allusions (now reduced to fine-spun and esoteric learning and newly minted words), since a really well-educated person of the day would know Homer by heart. Farmers would be aware that a “large, black grape” (rhox) described the black widow spider to a tee, so Nicander (or his source, an obscure Apollodorus of c. 250 B.C.^[53]) inserted the term for vivid contrast while detailing gruesome symptoms.^[54] And what did farmers and rural folk do for snake bite? What one would expect: treated themselves, with time-tested remedies, also recorded by Dioscorides two hundred years later. Most victims of snake bite—even of cobra envenomation—survived.^[55] Worse were the poisonous concoctions of aconite, potions made from blister beetles, and the scorpion stings which still carry off many children and elderly people in North Africa. So much for Cleopatra's asp; there were easier ways to go, as any farm boy could have told her.^[56]

Discussion

E. N. Borza:

Clearly the Greeks were interested in theory and speculation. This is evidenced, as Professor White pointed out, by the work of the Alexandrians. Someone once observed that, had the theory that was developed by Alexandrian science been translated into machinery, Julius Caesar could have conquered Gaul on a railway system. But that didn't happen. To what extent did the theory and speculation among Greek scientists, especially the Alexandrians, have practical applications and affect the real world?

K. D. White:

If we turn to hydraulics, surely the record is quite impressive. The Archimedean screw is a very efficient piece of machinery. It did the job that was needed, in Egypt, where you needed to lift considerable quantities of water on a very shallow gradient. With a man-powered treadmill you got adequate power to do all the irrigation you needed. Basically, a society gets the technology that it requires. The inventive capacity for the steam engine certainly was there, but was the motivation there that would be required to produce the kind of big technical advances you're thinking about? In addition to the Archimedean screw they had the water wheel used as a mill. Vitruvius describes this, and we have the entries on milling in the edict of Diocletian of A.D. 301, which mention the water mill. We now have enough evidence from actual remains to show that the story that the water mill wasn't exploited until the Middle Ages is complete nonsense. No less than three water mills have been identified on Hadrian's wall.

J. Scarborough:

I think the question as you pose it contains modern technological assumptions. I would answer with a question. These theories that you imply are nonpractical—why would they last for so long? Think of the fact that your great-great-great-great-grandfather would still be talking about a physical and medical universe made up of humors. What gave such notions their staying power?

S. M. Burstein:

What about the saqia? This is an animal-driven water wheel in which the animal's circular motion is translated by a series of cogwheels into the motion of a rotating vertical wheel to which jugs are attached. Archaeology suggests that this device was invented and spread during the Ptolemaic period. This certainly sounds like an example of the practical application of the sort of cogwheel speculation that was going on at this time. Moreover, it is hard to understand its spread except as the result of a deliberate effort. Or am I wrong on this?

K. D. White:

No, you're absolutely correct. In addition, I think we should note the difficulties involved in identifying the metal and wooden parts of all sorts of machines. There very well may have been machines in use which we simply can't know anything about.

P. Levi:

What technology is nowadays expected to accomplish is the concentration or the transference of energy. And we know from the raising of obelisks that the practical mathematics were quite highly developed. It's quite clever to raise a monolithic column or an obelisk. But I take it that what went wrong with the Hellenistic rulers' exploration of different techniques is that they had too much man power—they had too many slaves. To have slaves is, apart from being wicked, inefficient, because you may use a million men where one machine could have done the job.

K. D. White:

In antiquity they got along well enough with man power, and when necessary with animal power. The column drums for the Parthenon were conveyed in wagons with as many as thirty-eight oxen pulling them. Are you suggesting that they could have invented a source of power more efficient than thirty-eight oxen pulling the wagon to move stone, if they hadn't had slaves?

P. Levi:

Well, I'm not quite clear how many fields thirty-eight oxen would have grazed, but it makes quite a lot of fields for the oxen working in the quarries. And so there is some inefficiency. What I claim is that the motive was lacking for innovation.

K. D. White:

You're only using the oxen for a very limited time in certain seasons of the year. The rest of the time they're down on the farm working and eating their heads off.

P. Woodruff:

I want to ask Professor White about the thesis that ancient scientists knew nothing of controlling experiments. His example of Philo of Byzantium showed that they could incorporate controls: for experimenting with artillery they varied only the bore of their catapult, keeping everything else the same, and saw what happened to the trajectory.

K. D. White:

On the strength of that example you could say that controlled experiment was understood.

M. Gagarin:

Philo's experiment, because it was a mechanical experiment, required a certain precision of measurement. The goal was to make a catapult that would follow a certain trajectory. You had to have a certain amount of control built into the experiment. But in other cases they didn't have that degree of precision in measurement, and they didn't need the control, because the purpose of the experiment was different. I think Philo's experiment does not show that they had any concept of controlled experiment, but rather that for certain purposes they needed and used controls. In the case of the exhalations of the bird you didn't need to control the experiment if all you were proving was the theoretical point that exhalations take place. Precision is irrelevant, since all you were trying to prove is that there were exhalations. I would suggest that the longevity of some of the physiological theories is precisely because you don't have the possibility for measurement and control and the sort of certainty and testing in experiments in that area that you do in the mechanical areas. So in the mechanical sciences this need for precision would necessarily lead to greater efficiency of machines, whereas—how do you prove or disprove the theory of the four humors?

J. Scarborough:

For the ancient mind the idea of an experiment to prove the existence or nonexistence of the four humors was irrelevant. People always ask, “Why didn't the Greeks discover the circulation of the blood?” as if they were looking for it. Well, they weren't. Why not? They had the idea after a while that blood functioned much as the philosophers had argued that things function: as a part of how the body worked in life. You might object that that doesn't answer anything; but it did for them. Even Leonardo studied anatomy much as Galen and Vesalius studied it. You look and you see and you explain. How do you explain? You have preconceived ideas and theories. You test them and see if they fit. The answer is always yes, they do. It comes down to the fact that the way you ask the question is almost as important as the answer you're looking for—which is postulated by the question you're asking. The problem is to formulate the question in a way that would be understood by the ancient mind. That's hard because of our scientific background.

P. Green:

I think Peter Levi was right to bring in the social aspect of this question, which runs all the way through. A central problem is that regarding alternative sources of energy. Why were they not used or exploited? I think Professor White slightly skirted the issue of the water wheel chronologically, because in fact it did turn up much later than one might expect, and precisely when man power, if not animal power, was running rather short. Professor White mentioned Hadrian's wall and Diocletian; these are late. Now why was there no steam engine when all the components were present? Professor Levi raised the problem of the availability of slaves. I think that is only the beginning of it. If you look away from technology for a moment, what you find throughout antiquity is a paranoid terror of revolution. It's no accident that the Greek and Latin terms for making a revolution are neoterizein and res novare—that is, just doing something new. In quite a few treaties and drafts for constitutions there are provisions that allies must go to the assistance of any allied state suffering from a revolution. It's not so much that slaves were available, which indeed they were. No, the ruling classes were scared, as the Puritans said, of Satan finding work for idle hands to do. One of the great things about not developing a source of energy that did not depend on muscle power was the fear of what the muscles might get up to if they weren't kept fully employed. The sort of inventions that were taken up and used practically were the things that needed muscle power to start with, including the Archimedean screw. On the other hand, consider that marvelous box gear of Hero's: it was never used. That would have been a real conversion of power. What got paid for? The Lagids tended to patronize toys, fraudulent temple tricks in large quantities, and military experiments. Dissection was only tolerated when there was an enlightened Ptolemy who was prepared to back it. After that it went out again.

K. D. White:

There is a famous passage in Suetonius' life of Vespasian in which a technician appears before the emperor to advocate some kind of new device, we're not quite sure what. But the answer of the emperor to an aide is, give him a reward and send him away, and please leave me here to feed my little people. Sine me pascere plebeculam meam. I think this is in line with what you're saying. Apart from the slaves, pace Professor Levi, there were lots of underemployed free citizens, and plebeculam meam surely refers to them. The lack of employment was not confined to slaves; it included underemployed free citizens.

S. M. Burstein:

The common wisdom that cheap slave labor inhibited the development of technology in antiquity should probably be reconsidered for two reasons. First, slaves are expensive, not cheap. Second, as the history of the antebellum American South indicates, the use of slave labor is not incompatible with the development of labor-saving technology, provided—and it is an important proviso—that the technology increases the productivity and value of the slaves.

A. A. Long:

I think one has to look at the so-called failure of technology to develop also in relation to the theoretical sciences. Here I'm partly agreeing with John Scarborough on the absurdity of the notion that you would try to prove the existence of the four humors. Why prove them? It's self-evident that they're there! In the case of astronomy: Greek astronomy is an astonishing achievement. But of course it was based, except for the brief moment of Hipparchus, on assumptions that we see as totally false. There just wasn't a sufficient reason to invent, for example, the telescope when you had an astronomical theory which, with extraordinary mathematics, could fit the appearances. You can save the appearances with Ptolemaic astronomy. Copernicus could have hunches that things were wrong, but it was only when Galileo showed that the moons of Jupiter were actually going around Jupiter that you had any basic evidence for questioning that kind of astronomy. So economic conditions are only one factor; but we also need to look at the state of the theoretical sciences to see why technological devices were not invented when we might think that there was a reason for them.

P. Green:

But would this apply to the parallel science of medicine? There you have a similar blockage. There were no thermometers, very little dissection, no instruments that allow you to do more than you can with the naked eye. The whole theory is based on what you can judge with the naked eye and with the sense of touch.

A. A. Long:

That's because, I would say, you think you have a totally comprehensive theory which will account for the appearances. The application of the elements to the notion of the humors, plus what you think you know about anatomy, seems to be sufficient.

Notes to Text

Notes to Response