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

LSJ s.v. II; Hornblower, S. Thucydides, Baltimore 1987, 9.
128
On the usage of îstoría and îstorikó~ in the sense of ‘history’ and ‘historian’, see
Arist.
Rhet. 1359b 30f., 1360a 30–36; Poet. 1451b 1–7, 1459a 21–24; Anaximenes
(
FGrHist 72 F 3, 9); Louis, op. cit., 40f. Eudemus’ older contemporary Ephorus en-
titled his universal history ˆIstoríai; he was followed by Duris of Samos (born ca.
340). On Theophrastus’ and Praxiphanes’ Perì îstoría~ see above, 139.

---

Chapter 4: The historiographical project of the Lyceum
148
chance to verify how far our own notions correspond to the ancient ones. The
Catalogue of geometers, which goes back to Eudemus, ends with a revealing
sentence: “those who have written histories (of geometry) bring to this point
their account of the development of this science.”
129
These words clearly show
that ancient readers, too, regarded Gewmetrik3 îstoría as a historical account
of the progress of geometry.
The subject of Eudemus’ works on the history of science was the develop-
ment of three
mathe¯mata – geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy – from their
emergence at the beginning of the sixth century to the middle third of the fourth
century; nor did the author fail to mention their oriental origins. The last math-
ematicians named in the
History of Geometry belong to the generation of Eu-
doxus’ students. This agrees with the chronological framework of the
History
of Astronomy, which begins with Thales (fr. 143) and ends with Eudoxus’ stu-
dent Callippus (fr. 149), who was Eudemus’ contemporary. In the
Catalogue,
all the names of the mathematicians are given in chronological order, often with
indications of who was older and younger, who was whose student, etc. Be-
sides, we know that Eudemus considered the Pythagoreans in the first book of
the
History of Arithmetic (fr. 142), Hippocrates’ quadrature of the lunes in the
second book of the
History of Geometry (fr. 140), and Eudoxus’ and Callippus’
theories in the second book of the
History of Astronomy (fr. 148–149).
Wehrli, in contrast, believed that Eudemus’ material was not arranged in
chronological order, following the succession of the mathematicians, but rather
in terms of the history of problems.
130
This principle is indeed convenient for
the analysis of the approaches of several generations of mathematicians to the
solution of the same problem; Pappus often used it when dealing with famous
problems of the past, such as duplicating the cube, etc. The material of the early
Greek mathematics accessible to Eudemus, however, was too various and abun-
dant to be reduced to a thin thread of problems running throughout its history,
which made the historico-problematic approach to it thoroughly inadequate.
Nor does this approach seem very convenient for the historical treatment of
whom such and such mathematical discovery belongs to, which was, as I will
show, one of Eudemus’ main goals. It is obvious that such figures as Thales,
Mamercus, Pythagoras, and Oenopides interested him owing to their dis-
coveries, and not by virtue of the fact that they had been working on the same
problems. Oenopides’ discoveries in geometry, by the way, can hardly qualify
as a “maßgebender Gedanke” (5.4); Eudemus probably mentioned them for the
simple reason that he knew that Oenopides made them. As for Mamercus,
Eudemus could hardly know anything about him apart from the fact that he was
129
oî tà~ îstoría~ @nagráyante~ mécri toútou proágousi t3n t4~ ëpist2mh~
taúth~ teleíwsin (Procl. In Eucl., 68.4f. = Eud. fr. 133).
130
“Problemgeschichtliche Anordnung” (Wehrli.
Eudemos, 119). “Der Stoff war nach
Auftreten und Entwicklung der maßgebenden Gedanken, nicht nach Autoren geord-
net” (ibid., 113). The last definition repeats Leo’s words (