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

vilisation, Konstanz 1993, 146f.
23
Hdt. VI, 127; Her. Pont. fr. 152; Arist.
Pol. 1310b 19f.; Ephor. FGrHist 70 F 115,
176; Schwabacher, W. Pheidonischer Münzfuß,
 RE19 (1938) 1946ff.; Andrewes, A.
The Corinthian Actaeon and Pheidon of Argos,
CQ 43 (1949) 74ff.

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2. Heurematography and the ‘Greek miracle’
29
inventor of weights and measures.
24
The shipbuilder Ameinocles of Corinth,
who was invited to build ships on Samos, worked in the mid-seventh century or
even earlier.
25
From the early seventh century on, vase painters, potters, and,
later, sculptors considered it natural to sign their works,
26
so that the names of
the early
pro¯toi heuretai in this field go back to signatures left by artists them-
selves.
27
These include, for example, Butades of Sicyon (seventh century), the
legendary inventor of ceroplastics (the art of modeling in wax), whose works,
signed and dedicated to the temple, were preserved in Corinth until the Hellen-
istic epoch.
28
Glaucus of Chios (early sixth century), a renowned master whom
Herodotus calls the inventor of iron soldering (sid2rou kóllhsi~), produced
and signed a silver crater on an iron stand that the Lydian king Alyattes later
dedicated to the temple in Delphi (Hdt. I, 25; cf. Paus. X, 2–3). The architect
Mandrocles of Samos, who built the bridge across the Bosporus for Darius’ ex-
pedition against the Scythians (513 BC), spent part of his generous reward to
commission a picture of the bridge. He dedicated it to the temple of Hera, sup-
plying it with an epigram that mentioned his name (Hdt. IV, 87–89).
Even this fragmentary evidence of the archaic epoch testifies that the search
for
pro¯toi heuretai reflected contention for priority, typical of Greek culture on
the whole. Thus, the tradition on first discoverers leads us to the problem of
priority for all sorts of social and cultural innovations, a problem much broader
than both heurematography and the history of science.
2. Heurematography and the ‘Greek miracle’
The investigation of the ‘Greek miracle’, the unique complex of qualities that
distinguishes Greek culture from everything that preceded it, brings the prob-
lem of the authorship of cultural achievements into particularly sharp focus.
24
Kleingünther,
op. cit., 82. The tradition on the Lydian invention of the golden coins
(Xenoph. 21 B 4; Hdt. I, 94) also goes back to the seventh century.
25
Thuc. I,13.3. According to Thucydides, whose information derives from written
sources of the fifth century, Ameinocles was invited to Samos “300 years before the
beginning of the Peloponnesian war”. See Hornblower, S.
A commentary on Thucy-
dides, Vol. 1, Oxford 1991, 42f.
26
Jeffery, L.H.
The local scripts of archaic Greece, 2
nd
ed., Oxford 1990, 62, 83, 230f.;
Philipp, H.
Tektonon Daidala, Berlin 1968, 77f.; Walter-Karydi, E. Die Entstehung
des beschrifteten Bildwerks,
Gymnasium 106 (1999) 289–317.
27
Thraede. Erfinder, 1181.
28
Robert, C. Butades,
RE 3 (1897) 1079; Fuchs, W., Floren, J. Die griechische Plastik,
Vol. 1, Munich 1987, 197 (cited here are the names of other early masters from Co-
rinth). – Renowned in the mid-sixth century was the family of Chian sculptors and
architects, Archermus and his sons Bupalos and Athenis; their signed works sur-
vived until the time of Augustus (Plin.
HN 36, 5; Paus. IV,30.5; Svenson-Evers, H.
Die griechischen Architekten archaischer und klassischer Zeit, Frankfurt 1996,
108f.).

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Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers
30
Characteristic of this complex is, first and foremost, the emergence of literature
that is no longer anonymous. This implies that poets asserted the importance of
their work and hoped for its public acknowledgement, for which they sought to
link their names inextricably with their creations. Hand in hand with this go
criticism and praise of contemporaries and forerunners and a striving after
thematic and formal innovations.
29
These features, as typical of contemporary
literature as they are alien to the anonymous and traditional writings of the Near
East,
30
appeared in Greek poetry in the course of the several generations that
followed Homer and Hesiod. Still more important, Greek society of the archaic
epoch acknowledged these notions of the literary process as a norm.
It would be far-fetched to say that it was poets and musicians who taught
the Greeks to appreciate authorship and individual efforts as such. Parallel pro-
cesses were at work in the visual arts. From the seventh century on, artists’
claims to authorship are reflected in the signatures left on ceramics and sculp-
tures.
31
Names of the prominent architects are attested since the first third of
the sixth century, not least due to their own efforts. Chersiphron and Meta-
genes, the builders of the famous temple of Artemis at Ephesus, invented a
new method of transporting stone columns with the help of special wooden
rollers. Not satisfied to be known as the authors of a famous edifice, they wrote
a technical treatise that announced this and probably many other inventions as
well.
32
The architect and sculptor Theodorus, who built the temple of Hera on
Samos, also wrote a book about his work (Vitr. VII, praef. 12). According to
Pliny (
HN 7, 198), Theodorus’ inventions include the setsquare (norma), the
water gauge (
libella), and even the key (clavis). This information is likely, in