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

The uses of Greek and Latin, ed. by A. C. Dionisotti et al., London 1988,
111–126; idem. Greek science in the sixteenth-century Renaissance,
Renaissance
and revolution, ed. by J.V. Field, Cambridge 1993, 15–28 (with an extensive bibli-
ography); Grafton, A. From apotheosis to analysis: Some late Renaissance histories
of classical astronomy,
History and the disciplines, ed. by D. R. Kelley, Rochester

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1. The historiography of science in the 16th–18th centuries
5
Let us turn, for example, to one of the earliest works on the invention of
sciences, arts, crafts, etc., the famous
De rerum inventoribus by Polydore Ver-
gil.
11
For Polydore, as a humanist,
scientiae et artes were, in the first place, the
classical arts and sciences. Of the more than hundred authors he cites, only a
few belong to the medieval or to his own period, all the others being Greeks and
Romans. The proportion of ancient to modern discoveries (particularly noted
among the latter are printing and the invention of cannon) is roughly the same.
In the arrangement of his material and his focus on the problem of ‘who was the
first to invent what?’, Polydore follows heurematography, the ancient genre of
writings on first discoverers known to him primarily through Pliny.
12
Polydore
was one of the first to introduce to European historiography of science notions
typical of the Jewish writers of Antiquity and the early Christian apologists
who followed them: that the sciences were invented not by the Greeks, but by
the Biblical Patriarchs, who lived at a much earlier date.
The famous encyclopaedist of the 16
th
century, Petrus Ramus, considered at
length the history of mathematical sciences in the first book of his
Scholae
mathematicae, based exclusively on classical sources. Like Polydore, he fol-
lowed Josephus Flavius on the origin of astronomy and arithmetic: both
sciences were invented by the Chaldaeans; Abraham taught them to the Egyp-
tians who, in their turn, handed them down to the Greeks.
13
Luckily, Ramus
based his overview of Greek mathematics on Proclus’ commentary to book I of
the
Elements, which in turn relied on Eudemus’ History of Geometry.
14
Ramus’
curious demand to free astronomy from hypotheses and return to the times
when the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Greeks before Eudoxus foretold
celestial phenomena relying on observation and logic alone, goes back to Eude-
mus’
History of Astronomy, where Eudoxus figures as the first Greek who ad-
1997, 261–276; Siraisi, N. Anatomizing the past: Physicians and history in Renais-
sance culture,
Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000) 1–30; Cifoletti, G. The creation of
the history of algebra in the sixteenth century,
L’Europe mathématique, 121–142.
11
Polydorus Vergilius.
De rerum inventoribus, Venice 1499. In the course of three cen-
turies, this book was translated into eight languages and ran to more than a hundred
editions.
12
On Polydore’s ancient sources and his predecessors, see Copenhaver, B. P. The his-
toriography of discovery in the Renaissance: The sources and composition of Poly-
dore Vergyl’s
De inventoribus rerum, Vol. 1–3, J. of the Warburg and Courtauld In-
stitutes 41 (1971) 192–222; Polydore Vergil. On discovery, ed. and transl. by B. P.
Copenhaver, Cambridge, Mass. 2002, vi–xxix.
13
Ramus, P.
Scholarum mathematicarum libri unus et triginta, Basel 1569, 2. Ramus’
four periods in the history of mathematics – Biblical (from Adam to Abraham),
Egyptian, Greek, and Latin – soon become a common periodization. See below, 8.
14
Ramus’ chronological table of eminent Greek mathematicians (ibid
., 41) includes
almost all the relevant figures from Thales to Theon of Alexandria. His main source
for the pre-Euclidean period is Proclus (Eudemus), but he used also Diogenes Laer-
tius, Iamblichus, and Eutocius (ibid
., 6, 7, 9). Interestingly, Ramus refers to the prob-
lem of doubling the cube, initiated by Plato (ibid., 12). See below, 3.1.

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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography
6
vanced astronomical hypotheses to ‘save the appearances’. Coming as it did in
the midst of animated discussions on the status of astronomical hypotheses, this
demand was echoed by the leading astronomers of the time, in particular Kep-
ler, who sought confirmation of his views in the texts of the ancients while de-
monstrating his superiority to them.
15
The first Renaissance history of medicine,