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

Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte
der Mathematik, Vol. 2, Stuttgart 1988, 556–562; Schneider, I. Hintergrund und
Formen der Mathematikgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts,
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1–33; Vitrac, B. Mythes (et realités) dans l’histoire des mathématiques grecques an-

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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography
2
Arabic historiography of science, the field remains almost untouched. The Re-
naissance historiography of science has only recently come to be studied.
As a matter of fact, there is nothing surprising about this. The object of the
history of science is, in the first place, science itself. Historiography, whether
rightfully or not, has always remained in the background. For a historian of
science, the works of Euclid, Ptolemy, or Newton are of greater importance
than the historico-scientific literature contemporary to them. To be sure, some-
times this literature may prove to be a valuable source, for example, when the
original scientific writings have been lost. The first histories of science were
written by the Peripatetic Eudemus of Rhodes even before Euclid’s
Elements
summed up the first three centuries of Greek mathematics. Whereas from Eu-
clid we learn
what was discovered during this period, it is Eudemus who tells us
who made these discoveries and when, also adding some material not included
in the
Elements. Similarly, the history of early Greek astronomy is known
mainly from Eudemus and from the doxographical work of Theophrastus, his
colleague in the Lyceum. This is what actually accounts for the pragmatic in-
terest shown by historians of Greek science in the surviving fragments of Eude-
mus and other Peripatetics. Yet outside Antiquity and after the invention of
printing in particular, the purely pragmatic approach to the historiography of
science is hardly justified. Those who study the science of the 16
th
–18
th
cen-
turies turn, as a rule, to primary sources, not to the historico-scientific literature
of the epoch, which was mostly antiquarian in character and did not aim to
cover the latest discoveries. As a result, the interest in this literature as a source
is still smaller than that enjoyed by the historico-scientific tradition of An-
tiquity.
Our subject is the ancient historiography of science. ‘Pre-modern’ histori-
ography of science interests us only insofar as it reveals a marked continuity
with the ancient tradition, both on the formal and the thematic level. If the his-
tory of science revived in Europe as the history of Greek science, it was because
the science of the 15
th
–17
th
centuries was itself oriented toward assimilating the
classical heritage. In this period, the interests of scientists and historians of
ciennes,
L’Europe mathématique: histoires, mythes, identités, ed. by C. Goldstein et
al., Paris 1996, 31–51.
2
Smith, W. D. Notes on ancient medical historiography,
BHM 63 (1989) 73–109;
Staden, H. von. Galen as historian,
Galeno: Obra, pensamiento e influencia, ed. by
J. A. López Férez, Madrid 1991, 205–222; Pigeaud, J. La médicine et ses origins,
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 9 (1992) 219–240. The collection Ancient his-
tories of medicine. Essays in medical doxography and historiography in classical
Antiquity, ed. by Ph. J. van der Eijk, Leiden 1999, constitutes the first attempt at sys-
tematic approach to this subject. For the earlier literature, see Heischkel, E. Die
Medizinhistoriographie im XVIII Jh.,