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

historical only by
turning to recent or contemporary developments. When trying to ‘reconstruct’
the distant past as recorded, if at all, in oral tradition, it resorted to the most fan-
gods, for the gods could hardly be called góhte~ ^Ida$oi Frúge~ Ándre~. For more
detail, see Zhmud, L. PRWTOI EURETAI – Götter oder Menschen?, Antike Na-
turwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption, Vol. 11 (2001) 9–21.
6
Thraede, K. Erfinder,
RLAC 5 (1962) 1192.
7
For material on ancient heurematography, see Brusskern, J. C.
De rerum inventarum
scriptoribus Graecis, Bonn 1864; Eichholtz, P. De scriptoribus Perì eûrhmátwn
(Diss.), Halle 1867; Kremmer, M.
De catalogis heurematum (Diss.), Leipzig 1890;
Wendling, E.
De Peplo Aristotelico (Diss.), Strasbourg 1891; Kleingünther, op. cit.,
passim; Kienzle, E.
Der Lobpreis von Städten und Ländern in der älteren grie-
chischen Dichtung (Diss.), Kallmünz 1936; Thraede. Erfinder, 1191ff.; idem. Das
Lob des Erfinders. Bemerkungen zur Analyse der Heuremata-Kataloge,
RhM 105
(1962) 158–186.
8
My calculations, based on the alphabetical index of inventors in Kremmer (
op. cit.,
113f.), give the following numbers: men – 56; cities and peoples – 43; gods – 33; he-
roes – 56. This data is certainly very approximate, because: 1) Kremmer’s catalogue
is selective and based mainly on late sources, where many historical figures are lack-
ing; 2) I omit almost all names that cannot be related to any group; 3) the gods in-
clude Dactyls, Kouretes, Centaurs, Moirae, Cyclops, etc.; 4) the heroes include not
only Roman kings (Numa Pompilius, etc.), but also a great number of etymological
fictions, such as Iambe, the inventor of iambus; 5) on the other hand, numbered
among the men are such doubtfully historical personalities as Anacharsis and King
Midas, who could not, anyway, count as heroes.

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Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers
26
tastic combinations. “The more arbitrary the first suggestion was, the better
chances it had to be taken up.”
9
Hence, the value of the evidence on the Idaean
Dactyls is not that it could (or was meant to) point out the real inventors of the
blacksmith’s work. Apart from marking the lower limit of the period when in-
terest in
pro¯toi heuretai arose, it contains the germs of two important tenden-
cies that were to be developed later. I mean, first, the gradual and incomplete re-
placement of gods by semi-divine/heroic figures and next by people, and sec-
ond, the Greeks’ proclivity to assign inventions, including their own, to Orien-
tal neighbors.
Let me stress again that this was not a linear process; sometimes the changes
were of an alternative character. Depending on the public mood, the peculiar-
ities of each particular work, the goals and attitudes of its author, and, last but
not least, the character of the invention itself, different figures came to occupy
the foreground.
10
A character from an earlier tradition who had receded into the
background could reappear side by side with ‘new’ inventors. If heurema-
tography records, on the whole, hardly more ‘human’ discoveries than those as-
signed to gods and heroes, this is rooted in the natural inclination to associate
the beginnings of civilization with divine assistance and in the obscurity and
anonymity of the real inventors of old. A tendency, peculiar to the epideictic lit-
erature, to honor divine inventors by crediting them with as many discoveries as
possible also has to be taken into account. In the late catalogues of discoveries,
it resulted in ascribing the same invention to several gods and heroes, usually
without any attempt to reconcile the mutually exclusive versions.
11
From the late fifth century on, professional literature dealing first with the
history of poetry and music and then with that of philosophy, science, and
medicine gradually reduces to a minimum the divine and heroic share in dis-
coveries. While the history of music, in particular that of its earlier stages, still
features such names as Orpheus, Musaeus, or Marsyas, the histories of philos-
ophy, astronomy, and geometry include only real historical characters. In this
respect, Peripatetic historiography is more critical than many historical works
of the 17
th
and even 18
th
centuries, whose accounts of Greek astronomy start
with Atlas, Uranus, and other mythological figures. Admittedly, in Antiquity
the historicity in the treatment of material depended not so much on when a
given work was written as on its genre. The author of an encomium, a hymn, a
tragedy or a work