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

Anaphoricus the introduction and, consequently, the names
are absent, while the introduction to his work on geometry, which later consti-
tuted book XIV of Euclid’s
Elements, is very similar to Diocles’ one. Accord-
6
Geuss,
op. cit., 175 n. 155.
7
See above, 143.
8
Asper, M. Mathematik, Milieu, Text. Die frühgriechische(n) Mathematik(en) und
ihr Umfeld,
Sudhoffs Archiv 87 (2003) 1–31.
9
Eudemus, Naucrates, Euclid (I); Philonides (II); Attalus, Thrasydeus, Conon, Nico-
teles (IV). Reference is rarely made to particular theories and discoveries.
10
Diocles.
On burning mirrors, 3–7, 15. Further on, the text makes two mentions of
Archimedes (136; 149). Menaechmus, Aristeas the Elder, and Euclid, as well as
Diocles’ numerous forerunners in the solution of the problem of doubling the cube,
are not named at all (186–207).

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1. The decline of the historiography of science
281
ing to Hypsicles, his father and Basilides of Tyre who visited the father in Alex-
andria, pointed to a mistake in Apollonius’ work on regular polyhedra, after
which Hypsicles himself found the correct proof in the second edition of Apol-
lonius’ work and decided to develop it. We learn hardly anything more from
Hipparchus’ commentary to Eudoxus’ and Aratus’
Phaenomena. In his intro-
duction, Hipparchus sets himself the task of correcting the mistakes of Eudoxus
and his follower Aratus that were left unnoticed even by Attalus, the best of the
earlier commentators; apart from these three, only Philip of Opus and Pytheas
are briefly mentioned in the commentary (28.3, 30.8). The three astronomical
treatises by Theodosius of Bithynia (late second century), including his
Sphaerics, a textbook compiled of material partly going back to the fourth cen-
tury, contain practically no references.
11
Taken as a whole, the surviving texts of Hellenistic mathematicians and as-
tronomers demonstrate that they could not care less about presenting their pre-
decessors’ contribution in a historical perspective. What interested them as a
rule was their precursors’ errors and failures, rather than the problems the latter
had succeeded in solving. Even such summarizing works as Euclid’s
Elements
or Apollonius’
Conics aimed primarily and, in fact, solely at the systematic ar-
rangement of vast, often heterogeneous material and at giving it an impeccable
mathematical form.
12
Although for scientists, particularly those who work in
the productive period of their science’s evolution, each of these aims seems
natural, both are diametrically opposed to the perspective from which Eude-
mus’ history of science was written. And there lies one of the reasons why the
historical view of science appeared to be unclaimed by Greek scientists them-
selves.
Another factor was, probably, that of narrow specialization. Mathematicians
and astronomers of the Hellenistic epoch did not, as a rule, venture out of their
domain. One of the few exceptions is the historian and geographer Eratos-
thenes, who is particularly notable for his interest in the history of science. As a
result, at least in the surviving texts, that second-order discourse is lacking that
is characteristic, for instance, of Arabic culture, in which scientists were more
versatile (even to the detriment of originality) and the history of science served
as an introduction to the discipline and included reflections on science’s
methods, its present, past, and future, and its relationship with power, society,
and the science of other peoples. Unlike the innumerable references to the
mythical ‘Chaldaeans’, the properly