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

historical information on Babylonian as-
tronomy borrowed by the Greeks is insignificant and does not bear comparison
11
Heath.
History 2, 246ff.; Bulmer-Thomas, I. Theodosius of Bithynia, DSB 13 (1976)
319–321. Only his
On Days and Nights mentions Meton and Euctemon, as well as
Euclid’s
Phaenomena (II, 10, 18).
12
Although Apollonius does not generally conceal his debt to his predecessors, Pappus
(
Coll. VII, 676.25ff.) reproaches him with boastfully attributing other people’s
achievements to himself, contrasting him, strangely enough, with the just and noble
Euclid, who, as far as we know, never referred to anyone at all.

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Chapter 8: Historiography of science after Eudemus: a brief outline
282
with the well-documented history of the Arabs’ reception of Greek astronomy.
The authors of the Imperial age, who are closer to philosophy, gave some atten-
tion to this subject, but the level, character, and even the volume of this material
is negligible compared to that found in Arabic sources, even from the point of
view of a person who, like myself, has only second-hand knowledge of it.
Unlike mathematicians and astronomers, the Greek engineers of the third
century, Ctesibius, Philo of Byzantium, and Biton, the authors of treatises on
siege and shooting engines, show a much greater interest in the history of their
discipline.
13
Thus, Ctesibius’
Belopoeica, which has survived in Hero’s retel-
ling,
describes thoroughly and in detail the construction of the earliest non-torsion
arrow-shooting engine, the
gastraphetes, and then writes a unique and important
constructional theory of torsion catapults from the first primitive design to ad-
vanced machines built in accordance with the formulae for calibration. Thus he
covers technical developments with regard to torsion engines in the period ca.
350–270 B.C.
14
Though the treatise does not mention any names (they might have been present
in Ctesibius, but are left out in Hero), on the whole his preface and his text tes-
tify to the author’s intention to present the research and experiments of his fore-
runners in progress, rather than as a sum of finished achievements. The same
approach can be traced in the textbook on artillery written by Philo, Ctesibius’
follower:
In old days, some engineers were on the way to discovering that the fundamental
basis and unit of measure for the construction of engines was the diameter of the
hole. This had to be obtained not by chance or at random, but by a standard
method which could produce proportion at all sizes … The old engineers, of
course, did not reach a conclusion, as I say, nor did they determine the size, since
their experience was not based on a sound practical foundation. But they did de-
cide what to look for. Later engineers drew conclusions from former mistakes,
looked exclusively for a standard factor with subsequent experiments at a guide,
and introduced the basic principle of construction, namely the diameter of the
circle that holds the spring. Alexandrian craftsmen achieved this first, being
heavily subsidized because they had ambitious kings who fostered craftsmanship
(
Belop., 106f.).
Biton’s book is more technical and descriptive, but even he does not fail to
name the inventors of each of the six mechanisms he is writing about. He even
reports where each of them was invented, so that we learn, for example, that
13
This feature has already been noted (Cuomo.
Pappus, 95f.; eadem. The machine and
the city: Hero of Alexandria’s Belopoeica,
Science and mathematics, 165f.), with-
out, however, being adequately explained. It might, to a certain extent, be related to
the style of these treatises, which is rather discursive and free from the strict limits
imposed on the mathematical works by the axiomatico-deductive method of pre-
senting the results.
14
Marsden, E.W.