Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Influence to the Later Middle Ages
Author | ISBN 9780313204739 | |
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Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Influence to the Later Middle Ages is a book by science historian William Harris Stahl, published in 1962 by University of Wisconsin Press.
Synopsis
This book
Content
The initial section on "Classical Greek Origins" treats the discoveries of
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.[3]
Nicomachus and Apuleius are treated in the chapter on the second century AD, while Latin neoplatonist encyclopedists Solinus, Calcidius, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella are treated in the chapter on Third- and Fourth-Century Cosmography.[4][3]
The last part of the volume describes the 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.[4] From the twelfth century onward, Latin translations of Arabic and Greek works were to revolutionise the intellectual life of Western Europe and diminish the predominance of the Latin encyclopedists.[3]
The themes treated in the volume were anticipated in an article of the same title that Stahl published in 1959 in the journal Isis.[2]
The author is critical of the way Roman authors treated quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) – but also geography – in their handbooks.[4] 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 primary sources they had not read, and not acknowledging the secondary sources they had read instead.[4]
The fact that any of these handbooks, Greek or Latin, quotes an original source cannot be taken for evidence that the compiler was himself acquainted with that source, as the quotations could have come from intermediate works.[3]
Part | Chapter |
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Part One:
Greek Origins |
I. Introduction |
II. Classical Greek Origins | |
III. Early Hellenistic Handbook 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 Scient 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
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.[5]: 58
For Abraham Wasserstein, the merit of Stahl's work is that it provides a "history and aetiology of a great failure" of Roman civilization – 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".[3]
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-313-20473-9.
- ^ ISSN 0021-1753.
- ^ ISSN 0073-2753.
- ^ ISSN 0002-9475.
- .