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

The idea of progress in England, New Haven 1990, 29ff.
63
Thus,
Wissenschaft in the subjective sense used to mean “persönliche Fähigkeit, Fer-
tigkeit, Geschichtlichkeit”, in the objective sense “jeder Wissenszweig samt der
praktisch-nützlichen Anwendung” (Bumann, W. Der Begriff der Wissenschaft im
deutschen Sprach- und Denkraum,
Der Wissenschaftsbegriff. Historische und sys-
tematische Untersuchungen, ed. by A. Diemer, Meisenheim am Glan 1970, 64–75).
64
The future researcher may well find similar contradictions in what seems logically
obvious to us.
65
A source book in Medieval science, ed. by E. Grant, Cambridge, Mass. 1974, 3f.,
53ff.

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Chapter 1
In search of the first discoverers:
Greek heurematography and the origin of the history of science
1. Prõtoi eûretaí: gods, heroes, men
In theory, a study of the origins of the history of science in Antiquity should
start from the point where history and science first intersect, i.e., from a histori-
cal overview of the scientific discoveries of the past. The problem, however, is
that such overviews are unknown before the second half of the fourth century
BC, whereas the sporadic mentions that historians, for example Herodotus,
make of scientific discoveries belong not so much to history as to heurema-
tography. Yet this is not the only reason to regard heurematography, an utterly
unscientific genre with apparently little to offer history, as one of the fore-
runners of the history of science. Heurematography raised the question of how
knowledge and skill are originated and transmitted long before the history of
science appeared, and various answers to this question are part of the latter’s
prehistory. Which is why the common origins of the interest in
pro¯toi heuretai
shared by both genres can best be traced in this ‘prehistoric’ material.
* * *
Interest in the past is inherent, to different extents, in all societies, including
preliterate societies. The forms of its manifestation in ancient time are quite
various, but generally they fit into the long worked out typology of folklore and
early literary genres. Among the folklore genres, cosmogonic and etiological
myths are to be mentioned first, then the heroic epic, which in many though not
all cultures becomes the earliest literary genre. Another early literary genre
worth noting is the historical chronicle, characteristic of the Chinese and, to a
lesser extent, the Jewish tradition. This list does not, of course, exhaust the var-
iety of questions the ancients asked about their past. It simply reduces our
analysis to a number of definite themes that aroused constant interest and led to
the formation of stable genres. Thus, a cosmogonic myth answered the question
of the origin of the universe, an etiological myth explained the origin of par-
ticular elements of the civilization, say, a craft or a product important in a given
culture, such as beer in Sumer or wine in Greece. A heroic epic and, later, a
chronicle, told of things of still greater interest: ancestors’ glorious feats.
Ancient Greece, whose literary and cultural history begins with Homeric
and Hesiodean epics, manifests the same tendencies. The
Iliad tells of the her-
oic deeds of the Achaeans and the Trojans, the
Theogony, with its peculiar

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Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers
24
‘genealogical’ attitude, depicts the origin of the world inhabited by gods and
men. But the interest in the past characteristic of the epic is not identical to his-
torical interest as such. The first is satisfied with legends about gods and ancient
heroes; the second, oriented primarily toward men and their accomplishments,
seeks to explain the present by linking it with the past. For all the uniqueness of
the Homeric and Hesiodean epics, they have very little about them to suggest
that their authors had a properly historical interest. It is only natural, therefore,
that we do not find in either Homer or Hesiod any traces of a tradition on the