Leonid Zhmud The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity

Historical Dictionary of Ancient and
Modern Medicine includes, along with the biographies of eminent doctors, ar-
ticles on Asclepius and the centaur Chiron.
30
Even such an authority on the his-
tory of astronomy as Bailly still regarded Atlas, Zoroaster, and Uranus as the
first astronomers.
31
To be sure, much depended on individual preferences. Thus
Clerc, influenced by the critics, added a brief survey of the history of medicine until
the 16
th
century.
26
Ackermann, J. C. G.
Institutiones historiae medicinae, Nuremberg 1792.
27
See e.g. Weidler, J. F.
Historia astronomiae, sive de ortu et progressu astronomiae
liber singularis, Wittenberg 1741. Cf. above, 5 n. 14.
28
Worstbrock, F. J. Translatio artium. Über Herkunft und Entwicklung einer kulturhis-
torischen Theorie,
ArKult 47 (1965) 1–22. Cf. below, 8.3.
29
For growing criticism of the concept of
prisca sapientia in the 18
th
-century histori-
ography of philosophy, see Blackwell, C.W. T. Thales Philosophus: The beginning
of philosophy as a discipline,
History and the disciplines, 61–82.
30
Eloy, N. F. J.
Dictionnaire historique de la médicine ancienne et moderne, T. 1–4,
Liège 1755.
31
Bailly, J. S.
Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne depuis son origine jusqu’à l’établis-
sement de l’École d’Alexandrie, Paris 1775, 4. Bailly’s curious idea of a source com-
mon to all the astronomies of Antiquity, which he identified with Atlantis (Pasini, M.
L’astronomie antédiluvienne: Storia della scienza e origini della civiltà in J.-S.
Bailly,
Studi settecenteschi 11–12 [1988–89] 197–235), is similar to the thesis of a

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1. The historiography of science in the 16th–18th centuries
9
Baldi (1589) opened his collection with Thales’ biography, Biancani (1615) de-
cided not to mention Atlas, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Linus, etc., because they were
legendary figures impossible to date, while Montucla, even in the second edi-
tion of his famous
History of Mathematics (1799), could not get rid of Thoth as
the inventor of mathematics.
The 18
th
century, and its second half in particular, saw the rapid growth of lit-
erature on the history of science, which numbered hundreds of solid volumes.
32
As science itself developed and became more specialized, the chapters on
ancient science in general treatises grew shorter, remaining, however, subject
matter for most studies.
33
Moreover, the number of special works on ancient
science grew at least as fast as that of writings based on the material of Euro-
pean science alone.
34
In the middle of the 18
th
century, a historian of mathemat-
ics could still allow himself to restrict his work to the biographies of ancient
scientists.
35
Many writers continued to borrow from their Greek and Roman
teachers not only evidence, but also the problems to be considered in the history
of science. Of still greater importance than these particular borrowings was the
perspective itself, in which ancient science continued to be an integral part of
science as such, remaining, in this sense,
modern until at least the end of the
18
th
century. Admittedly, the new type of historiography emerging at the thresh-
old of the 19
th
century departs not from Greek science as such (the number of
well-known modern mathematician and historian of science who found the common
ground of all the ancient mathematical traditions in the megalithic culture of the
third to second millennium BC (Waerden, B. L. van der.