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

On Discoveries would hardly be seriously concerned with the
9
Thraede. Erfinder, 1207.
10
In the course of the sixth – fourth centuries BC, the invention of writing was success-
ively attributed to Cadmus, Danaus, Palamedes, Prometheus, Actaeon, and the
Egyptian god Thoth (see e.g.
FGrHist 1 F 20, 10 F 9, 476 F3). On the ‘secondary sac-
ralization’ of the
pro¯toi heuretai, see below, 37.
11
The bulk of the catalogues of discoveries actually derives from the epideictic litera-
ture: Thraede. Lob des Erfinders; Cole, T.
Democritus and the sources of Greek an-
thropology, Ann Arbour 1967, 6f.

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1. Prõtoi eûretaí: gods, heroes, men
27
reliability of the reported information.
12
In such genres as doxography or his-
tory of science, the writers usually avoided making up obvious inventions of
histories, even though they repeated some inventions made by the others.
There is one more reason why the succession ‘gods – heroes – men’ was not
strictly linear. In Homer and Hesiod and, naturally, before them, the Greek gods
were represented not as the first discoverers but as the ‘donors of goods’ and as
the patrons of crafts that they had
taught to men.
13
They turn into
pro¯toi heure-
tai only after the fame of the human inventors had spread throughout the Greek
world. Interest in first discoverers in the absolute sense, i.e., in those who in-
vented metallurgy, agriculture, writing, or music, awakens gradually, stimu-
lated by growing attention to innovations as such and to the question of priority
in their creation. Though the rapid social and cultural development of Greece
about 800–600 BC led to a lot of discoveries in all spheres of life, a certain
space of time was needed for specific interest in them to arise and take root. To
judge by the available evidence, the real creators of technical and cultural in-
novations – inventors, poets, musicians, painters, sculptors – commanded pub-
lic attention in the early seventh century.
Revealing in this respect is a fragment of one of the early lyric poets, Alc-
man, in which he professes his admiration for his predecessors, who “taught
people wonderful, soft and new sounds”.
14
The vocabulary of this fragment,
and the expression @nqrøpoi~ … Édeixan in particular, is very close to that
used in the tradition on
pro¯toi heuretai,
15
even though the motif of a first dis-
coverer is only implicit here. Although poets did teach people new sounds, it is
their relative rather than absolute novelty that Alcman must have had in mind:
the key notions prõtoi and e0ron are still lacking here. Yet in another frag-
ment, we find
‹
éph táde kaì mélo~ ^Alkmàn e0re (fr. 39 Page), whereby the
poet appears to claim the status of first discoverer for himself. A Homeric hymn
to Hermes ascribes to him the invention of the seven-string lyre (IV, 24–61).
Meanwhile, by that time there undoubtedly existed a tradition crediting Ter-
pander with this discovery,
16
Hermes himself hardly ever having been associ-
ated with music before.
17
The gradual character of the transformation of gods
12
This is true of Peripatetic heurematography as well; see below, 43.
13
See e.g.
Od. VI, 232f. on “a cunning workman whom Hephaestus and Pallas Athena
have taught all manner of craft” (Ön ˙Hfaisto~ dédaen kaì Pallà~ ^Aq2nh
técnhn pantoíhn). Cf. Od. XX, 72.
14
qaumastà d^ @nqrøpoi~ … garúmata malsaká … neócm^ Édeixan … (fr. 4.1
Page).
15
Davies, M. The motif of the prõto~ eûret2~ in Alcman, ZPE 65 (1986) 25–27.
16
This hymn is usually dated in the sixth century (Schmid, W., Stählin, O.