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

On Discoveries, Prome-
theus figured as the founder of philosophy (fr. 729 FHSG), whereas in his do-
xography this name was, of course, lacking. Properly speaking, the history of
science and heurematography coincide thematically only in regard to the in-
itial, ‘prehistoric’ period to which the emergence of science was related and on
which little definite was to be said. Eudemus, agreeing with Herodotus on the
Egyptian origin of geometry, immediately leaves this topic and proceeds to de-
scribe particular discoveries made by Greek mathematicians. Philip of Opus,
having admitted the Oriental origin of astronomy (
Epin. 986e – 987 A), con-
cludes with the famous remark: the Greeks bring to perfection what they bor-
row from the ‘barbarians’ (987d–e). It is the course of these documentarily at-
tested improvements that the history of science actually dealt with, while
heurematography remained, as a rule, on the level of ‘initial’, often fictitious in-
ventions and borrowings.
The obvious continuity between heurematography and a number of trends in
Peripatetic historiography should not be regarded as one stream flowing
smoothly into another. Among the important intermediate links between them
are the theories of the origin of culture that emerged in the second half of the
fifth century. They connected notions of z2thsi~ and eÛresi~ with the new
concepts of técnh put forward by the Sophists and gave powerful stimulus to
the study of culture in all its aspects. Most of these theories are known to us in
fragments and paraphrases; the only one that has survived in full is found in the
Hippocratic treatise
On Ancient Medicine (VM). Though its author is only a
generation younger than Herodotus, his views on the development of his técnh,
medicine, seem much more mature than the naïve genealogical constructions of
the historian. Going far beyond the cursory mentions of ‘discoveries’ that are
unrelated to each other, his original and integral conception considers the in-
vention of medicine against a background of the progress made by human
civilization as a whole. In the late fifth century, the search for
pro¯toi heuretai
obviously acquires a new dimension, which is reflected in systematic attempts
to create both a general theory of the origin of culture and the history of indi-
vidual técnai. These trends, independent of their kinship with heurema-
tography, deserve special consideration – both in themselves and as forerunners
of the historiography of science. It is, accordingly, time to draw a preliminary
conclusion from our survey of the early heurematographic tradition.
* * *
this subject (Plin.
HN VII, 194–209 = fr. 924 Gigon); Eichholtz, op. cit., 24f.; Wend-
ling,
op. cit., passim.

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Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers
44
Behind the variety of answers given by writers of the sixth and fifth centuries to
the question of ‘who discovered what?’ one can see the obvious tendency to-
ward the growing complexity of these answers. The question itself often ap-
pears to be merely a pretext to expound one’s views on the particular phenom-
enon or to explain the dynamics of evolving civilization in general. This ten-
dency derives, clearly, not so much from heurematography as such – after the
early fourth century it had hardly undergone serious change – but rather from
the general process of rationalization, the rapid development of philosophy and
science, and the growing self-awareness of their proponents. By the late fifth
century, Greek culture had actually acquired a history of its own. It is from this
time that we have the first reconstructions of mankind’s distant past and the first
attempts to devise a thorough and systematic account of the history of music
and poetry and to explore the origins of medical, philosophical and, probably,
scientific thought.
Little more than a hundred and fifty years passed between the earliest sur-
viving mention of