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

foundations of Greek science were complete. It is
very likely that Aristotle and his students had reached a similar conclusion. The
growing awareness that the formation of science and philosophy had been com-
pleted was probably one of the incentives for the research on the history of
knowledge undertaken in the Lyceum, which embraced the entire period from
the beginnings of mathematics, astronomy, theology, natural philosophy and
medicine until the second third of the fourth century. In fact, ideas had been ex-
pressed even earlier that a particular field of knowledge or skill, e.g. medicine
or rhetoric, had already reached its perfection.
12
Generalizing these ideas into a
theory that can be called teleological progressivism (5.5), Aristotle applied it to
the whole of Greek culture, which in many (though by no means all) of its as-
pects had by his time, in fact, reached the level that later proved to be unsur-
passed. In philosophy, Aristotle and his disciples regarded his system as the
consummation of the entire tradition from Thales until Plato, in a sense as the
consummation of philosophy as such. It is not by chance that physical do-
xography ended with Plato: for Theophrastus, Aristotle’s physics was no longer
dóxa, but ëpist2mh. Eudemus thought contemporary mathematics (and prob-
ably astronomy, too) had reached its perfection. Similar motives can be seen in
the attempts of Euclid, his younger contemporary, to summarize in ‘conclud-
ing’ writings the most indisputable results of previous investigations in ge-
ometry, arithmetic, astronomy, harmonics, and optics.
The leading position of mathematical sciences was reflected also in the
Greek classification of sciences. It originated with the Pythagoreans, who set
apart geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and harmonics as a specific group of
mathe¯mata, which was eventually extended to include many new spheres of
knowledge (2.3). This classification was based on the idea, formulated by
Archytas (47 B 1), of the close relationship between all sciences that use math-
ematical methods. Aristotle included in the
mathe¯mata not only astronomy and
harmonics, but also optics and mechanics, although he regarded them as ‘more
physical’ than pure mathematics (
Phys. 193b 22f.). According to a Hellenistic
classification preserved by Geminus,
mathe¯mata included geometry, arith-
metic, canonics (harmonics), astronomy, logistics, geodesy, optics, and mech-
anics.
13
Thus Greek ‘mathematics’, expanding at the expense of the applied
12
See above, 2.2, 2.4 and 3.5. It is revealing that, when speaking of the rapid progress
and soon completion of philosophy, Aristotle (fr. 53 Rose) rejected analogous pre-
tensions of his predecessors who claimed that, due to their talents, philosophy had
already reached perfection. The difference between them lies, therefore, not in the
character of their pretensions, but in their validity.
13
Gemin. ap. Procl.
In Eucl., 38,4–42,8. For the same classification, see Ps.-Heron.
Def., 164.9–18.

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Chapter 4: The historiographical project of the Lyceum
122
sciences, embraced a number of key disciplines that in the modern period have
been transferred to the domain of physics, whereas ancient ‘physics’ retained
only natural philosophy and the life sciences. Eudemus’ history of science ac-
cordingly covered only
mathe¯mata, while Theophrastus’ and Meno’s doxo-
graphical works treated physics and medicine. Likewise, Eudemus’
History of
Astronomy included only problems related to mathematical astronomy, where-
as physical astronomy constituted a special division of the