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

ximandre. Fragments et témoignages, Paris 1991, 203 n. 23. Cf. Arist. Cael. 295b
11–16: in Anaximander, the earth is at rest.
81
“Eudemus is trying to discover, in a good Aristotelian fashion, the nature of progress
in science that led to the situation as he knew it; results are what he wants to record.”
(Burkert.
L & S, 308).

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2. Thales and Anaximander
247
column’s drum. To be sure, the few extant fragments of the
History of Astron-
omy, even when supplemented by parallel material from the History of Ge-
ometry, do not enable us to say how consistently Eudemus discarded erroneous
ideas. It would be rash to allege that
all the ideas that contradicted the views of
the fourth-century specialists in astronomy remained outside the
History of As-
tronomy. By its very nature, astronomy could not develop as victoriously as
mathematics, and since even in the
History of Geometry there is criticism of
Antiphon’s failed attempt to square a circle, we can expect the
History of As-
tronomy to have contained similar material as well. In Antiphon’s case, how-
ever, ‘failed’ means ‘an attempt made by non-mathematical methods’, whereas
astronomy’s criteria of truth were not as strict as those used in geometry. Even
Eudoxian theory, the most scientific of the day, failed to ‘save the phenomena’
adequately and required further modifications. Hence, one can readily surmise
that Eudemus, when sorting out the discoveries of the ancient astronomers,
was compelled to apply less strict standards than those used in the
History of
Geometry.
These considerations are supported by the testimony already cited: Anaxi-
mander was the first to find an account of the sizes and distances of heavenly
bodies (fr. 146).
82
What is instructive here are the words prõtou … tòn
lógon eûrhkóto~.
83
Eudemus could not assert that Anaximander was the first
to have found the
true sizes of heavenly bodies and the actual distances be-
tween them: the figures accepted at the end of the fourth century differed con-
siderably from those of Anaximander,
84
not to mention that his system placed
82
Further on, Simplicius notes that the size of the sun and the moon and their distances
from the earth are estimated by observing eclipses (
In Cael. comm., 471.6–8). His
suggestion that this method was also discovered by Anaximander is, of course, er-
roneous: such computations appeared in the third century BC.
83
Mansfeld, J. Cosmic distances: Aëtius 2. 31 Diels and some related texts,
Le style de
la pensée. Recueil de textes en hommage à J. Brunschwig, ed. by M. Canto-Sperber,
P. Pellegrin, Paris 2002, 429–463, translates this phrase first as “Anaximander was
first to discover the ratio (lógo~) of the sizes and of the distances”, but then as “An-
aximander was first to speak of the sizes and distances” (454, 459). Now, lógo~ perì
megeqõn kaì @posthmátwn cannot possibly mean ‘ratio’, either in Eudemus, or in
Simplicius; in the latter lógo~ perí normally means ‘a theory/explanation of’.
Hence, Mansfeld’s assertion, built solely on his first translation, that the doxographi-
cal information on the sizes and distances in Anaximander derives from Eudemus,
and not from Theophrastus, remains unsubstantiated.
84
In Anaximander, the sun is of the same size as the earth (12 A 21); Philip of Opus
(
Epin. 983a) and Aristotle (Mete. 345a 36) believed it to be greater than the earth.
Eudoxus considered the sun to be 9 times greater than the moon (D 13 Lasserre) and
(possibly) 3.3 times greater than the earth (Heath.