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The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn

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The collapse of a whole society is nowadays a much prized topic. The environmental questions, the resource scarcity, the nuclear proliferation menace, the demographic explosion and many other `apocalyptic' dangers seem to remind us that every civilization is mortal.
From Gibbon to Tainter and more recently to Jarred Diamond the collapses of ancient societies like Roman or Maya empires were deeply studied. Nobody ever mentioned a similar collapse in Hellenistic times. An author, Lucio Russo, discovered it as scientific fall down. Russo considers that a real scientific revolution took place in Hellenistic times. Then it was forgotten as the science as a method has been abandoned in Antiquity to be only recovered 16 centuries later. In his development Russo describe the details of birth, decline and fall of Hellenistic science and technology in fields as mathematics, mechanics, geodesy, optics, astronomy, anatomy and even psychology. The Hellenistic researchers have obtained some incredible results such as the inverse square law of gravitation. This kind of affirmations may be challenged (and were largely challenged). It is not the point here. We must focus our inquiry on Russo's ground hypothesis and his researching methodology. We think that his approach may offer an interesting matter to future researches.

Timing for the first scientific revolution of the Hellenism

It is now generally accepted that the Hellenistic age started by 323 B.C. (with the death of Alexander the Great) and was finished by 30 BC (with the death of Cleopatra and the annexation of Egypt by Rome). Russo agrees with the starting point of Hellenistic times. But contrary to other historians for him the end of this age was linked to the end of a scientific revolution. according to Russo that happened in the second century B.C. when the scientific studies declined rapidly. The most serious collapse of scientific activity lay in the long wars between Rome and the Hellenistic states, from the plunder of Syracuse and the killing of Archimedes in 212 B.C. to 146 B.C. when Carthage and Corinth were razed to ground. Russo considers that Roman world of the third and second centuries B.C. was much more brutal then that of Virgil and Horace. As a matter of fact the refined culture acquired later by Roman intellectuals was the result of a continuing contact with the Hellenistic civilization, mainly through Greeks taken as slaves and by plundering the Greek works of art.
For Russo Alexandria's scientific activity, in particular, stopped in 145-144 B.C., when the king Ptolemy VIII initiated a policy of brutal persecution against the Greek ruling class.

Arguments in favor of a scientific discontinuity followed by a general decay

The feeling of decay was generally shared in Antiquity. As an example Seneca thought that "... far from advance being made toward the discovery of what the older generations left insufficiently investigated, many of their discoveries are being lost". A certain interruption of the oral transmission made ancient works incomprehensible.
As an example, among others, Russo mentions that Epictetus, regarded at the beginning of the second century A.D. as the "greatest luminary of Stoicism", confessed being unable to understand Chrysippus, his Hellenistic predecessor.
Russo challenges also the common opinion that the Almagest of Ptolemy rendered earlier astronomical treaties obsolete. This vision is inconsistent with an overlooked reality: "whereas astronomy enjoyed an uninterrupted tradition down to Hipparchus (and especially in the period since Eudoxus), the subsequent period lasting almost until Ptolemy's generation witnessed no scientific activity". There was here a deep cultural discontinuity. This break, attested in different other ways, is clearly illustrated by the astronomical observations mentioned in Almagest "... spread over a period of a few centuries, from 720 B.C. to 150 A.D., but leaving a major gap of 218 years: from 126 B.C., the date of the last observation attributed to Hipparchus, to 92 A.D., corresponding to a lunar observation by Agrippa". The author mentions also the relationship between the star catalog of Almagest and the star coordinates of Hipparchus citing the works of Grasshoff which has concluded that, although Ptolemy included in his catalog some coordinates measured by himself, he largely used also the results of Hipparchos of three centuries before.

Partial recovery, reproduction and selection of some scientific results, but with survival of the simplest and not the best

Hellenistic culture survived in a way during the Roman imperial age. The former Hellenistic kingdoms were not assimilated linguistically or culturally and from a technological and economical point of view there was a certain continuity with the preceding period. After the interruption produced by the wars with Rome, the `Pax Romana' permitted a partial recovery of scientific research in the first and second centuries A.D. (in the time of Heron, Ptolemy and Galen). But soon after that the decline was unstoppable. For some centuries "Alexandria remained the center of any scientific activity to be. The last scientist worthy of mention may have been Diophantus, if he really lived in the third century A.D. The activity documented in the fourth century A.D. is limited to compilations, commentaries and rehashing of older works; among the commentators and editors of that time we will be particularly interested in Pappus, whose Collection brings together many mathematical results".
The extent of the destruction of Hellenistic works has usually been underestimated in the past, due to the assumption that it was the best material that survived. Russo challenges this opinion.In fact, "in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of selection".
Is it the vision of Russo consistent with other actual researches? We may say yes. It is possible to discover a similar discontinuity and decay in the field of the special technologies closely related to science. In this respect Derek de Solla Price considered that "The existence of [...] Antikythera mechanism necessarily changes all our ideas about the nature of Greek high technology. [...] Hero and Vitruvius should be looked upon as chance survivors that may not by any mean be as representative as hitherto assumed". And Price affirm also that "Judging from the texts of Heron, Philon, and Ctesibius ... from the tradition of automatic globes and planetarium made by Archimedes and from the few extant objects (...) we may say that the technology of astronomical automaton underwent a period of intense development. The first major advances seem to have been made by Ctesibius and Archimedes, and the subsequent improvement must have been prodigious indeed. Those facts made possible, in the first century B.C. the Antikythera mechanism with its extraordinary complex astronomical gearing. From this we must suppose that the writings of Heron and Vitruvius preserve for us only a small and incidental portion of the corpus of mechanical skill that existed in Hellenistic and Roman times".
Even among some real scientific works which were preserved by the Byzantines and Arabs, two selection criteria seem to have been at work. "The first was to give preference to authors of the imperial period, whose writings are in general methodologically inferior but easier to use: we have, for example, Heron's work on mirrors, but not the treatise that, according to some testimonies, Archimedes wrote on the same subject. Next, among the works of an author the ones selected are generally the more accessible, and of these often only the initial portions. We have the Greek text of the first four, more elementary, books of Apollonius' Conics, but not the next four (of which three survived in Arabic); we have Latin and Arabic translations of the work of Philo of Byzantium on experiments in pneumatics, but none of his works on theoretical principles".

About the `fossilization of knowledge' as mean for later reconstruction of ancient achievements

The Latin or Greek authors of imperial period are citing the Hellenistic authors without really understanding the ancient scientific methodology. The science became `fossilized', crystallized, a dead fragment from the ancient living organism. Is this vision of a `fossilized science' consistent? We may think yes. We give just an example of such a `fossilized knowledge' transmitted by means of an oral communication withoutproper understanding of its content. In this respect Neugebauer cites the book Kāla Sankalita published in Madras in 1825 by Warren. Warren had traveled extensively in Southern India and had recorded the astronomical teachings of natives for the computation of lunar motions. "His informants no longer had any idea about the reasons for the single steps which they performed according to their rules. The numbers themselves were not written down but were represented by groups of shells placed on the ground. (...)Nevertheless they carried out long computations for the determination of the magnitude, duration, beginning and end of an eclipse with numbers which run into the billions in their integral part and with several (...) places for their fractions. Simultaneously they used memorized tables for the daily motion of the sun and moon involving many thousands of numbers". For Neugebauer is "evident that the methods found by Warren still in existence in the 19th century are the last witness of procedures which go back through the medium of Hellenistic astronomy...".
The fossilized knowledge` is in Russo's opinion the real origin for the recovery of science since XVIth century. And the `fossilized science` is also the ground on which he realized his spectacular reconstructions of several Hellenistic theories. Based on the `fossilized knowledge' of the Hellenistic science Russo starts - and this is his main methodological novelty- a new interpretation of loosed original sources. He focused on second hand information spread throughout the literary and not just scientific texts.

Conclusions and possibles paths for other researches

1. The actuality of this theory
Such a research seems at a first glance without practical significance. But the final interrogations of Russo concerns us all. The author asks if the decrease of a general and unified scientific theories to some fragmented and `fossilized knowledge' unable to produce new results may occur in the future or is just a matter of ancient past. His answer is definitely affirmative. Russo thinks that that vital substance of scientific knowledge is now a day reserved to smaller and smaller groups of specialists and that may endanger the future survival of science. So knowing what produced the ancient decay may allow us to escape the same destiny.

2.The opening up of other research (some questions and tentative answers)
We may underline a number of other questions raised by the Russo's considerations:
-Which is the specific element that makes the Greek Hellenistic world the first (and the last) scientifically developed society long before the modern world? Can the answer be found in multiple Hellenistic science centers (a plurality of competing Hellenistic kingdoms)?
-How to explain the fragility of Hellenistic achievements? Could it be linked to the small number of scientific, the nonexistence of printing facilities, the spreading of illiterate or the nonexistence of institutions (like the modern scientific academies)?
-Was the Hellenistic science an inevitable passage for the emergence of the modern science? Could the development of today science follow a different path?
-Finally, what role played the scientific decay in the fall of the Western Roman Empire? If the Romans, as successors of the Hellenistic states, lived in a scientifically impoverished society the path to the `Decline and fall of the empire' was unavoidable? We may suppose that a society without a real technological and scientific creativity has a dark future. Was the disappearance of the scientific method the real mortal illness of the Roman Empire? And if so what role will the science play for our own future?

A lot of questions resulting from the book and showing the incredible richness in Russo's work.

Author Lucio Russo argues that between 300 B.C. and 145 B.C., the Hellenistic Greeks developed and used "Galileo's" scientific method: they made theoretical models of phenomena (p. 178), drew inferences from their models, and then used experiments to test the validity of their inferences against reality.

In support of his thesis, the author presents evidence from many fields of science. For example, Erasistratus investigated animal metabolism via experiment (p. 156). Ctesibius constructed experimental equipment to explore the behavior of fluids (p. 77). Herophilus performed experiments to determine the functions of nerves (p. 151). Herophilus also stressed the importance of observation and experiment in medicine (p. 154), as did Philo of Byzantium in the case of weapons research (p. 111).

Technologies arose which exploited scientific findings; e.g., water pumps with spindle valves and alternating pistons (p. 124), differential gears (p. 130), and precision water clocks (pp. 102-103).

However, after 145 B.C. few were still capable of understanding Hellenistic science, mathematics, and technology. Not until the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance did Europeans - e.g., Leonardo da Vinci (p. 336) and Galileo (pp. 350-351) - begin to rediscover it, even if they didn't always understand it. Copernicus (p. 341) and Newton (p. 369) both acknowledged their debts to the Ancients. As late as 1872, mathematicians were re-inventing Euclid's definition of irrational numbers in terms of rational ones (pp. 46-47). (Indeed, the Ancients represented numbers by means of "modern" place notation and they used zero (p. 43).)

Whether considering their knowledge that the sun and moon govern the tides (p. 313) or that bodies of different masses fall through equal distances in equal times (p. 351), Russo reveals that the Ancients were far more sophisticated than we'd been led to believe.

The most interesting nonfiction book I have read in the last 5 years (i have read the italian version).
I expect that the appearance of the english version will start a serious discussion about the theses exposed in this book.
The fact that the author has a classical formation in addition to his scientifical training permits the interpretation of obscure ancient sources to support, imho convincingly, that the alexandrine civilization had reached unsuspected advances in all sciences.
(I am not a professional historian, nor am I a scientist; I am interested in science and history, that's why i found this book so interesting)

This book has two outstanding strengths:

First, its argument: That the Hellenistic era (ca. 330-30 BCE) saw a flowering of science that outstripped anything before - and for 1500 years after. Lucio Russo is convincing in that - even if he carries it sometimes too far (Darwinian theories, for example). His notion of "real science" combines an abstract model with a logical apparatus that can develop that model into novel (but real) consequences.

Second, its style: Russo describes mathematics, the core of Hellenistic science, in a way that should be comprehensible to both scientific and literary readers. Histories of science are seldom so artful.

These inherent virtues are reasons enough to read this book. Its relevance to today is something for readers to discover for themselves.

This books presents us very neglected topic concerning Hellenistic science. It is really sad that we have lost so much from this great historical period, in which science as a servant of the power had its greatest development in the antiquity, comparable to this from modern times, like enlightenment age. Development of science in enlightenment was possible, because of the Hellenistic knowledge, whose small part was saved. It is worth mentioning that Russo notices the strong correlation between the development of science in recent centuries and the exploration of different ancient Hellenistic sources. It is really very depressing that only so few facts about Hellenistic science are known. This book tells us a story about lost wisdom of great civilization. Wisdom, which was almost completely lost. But even its small parts, which were saved till modern times enabled us to reach present level of civilization, which is really high.

After reading the book I came here to read the reviews. It was a big surprise to find only four. Four reviews for four years (since 2004)? This is quite disturbing!
Disturbing, because the book reveals something fundamentally important about science and society - societal attitudes are determining whether science will thrive or die.
Ancient Greeks valued logic and fact. Mathematical reasoning and scientific fact for them had power. Contrary to that, Rome valued only the power of the sword. In Rome logical reasoning was nothing, while the power of verbal and physical persuasion was everything. Unfortunately, Rome conquered Greece. The free and illiterate Roman citizen kept educated Greek slaves who built the aqueducts, coliseums, bridges and roads.
The Romans were happy with their military badges and demanded only "bread and entertainment". Science, like Snow White, was put to sleep for ten centuries.

Imagine an ancient lost world, with a thriving, advanced culture of science and technology, utterly lost to history. Apparently, we do not need to look to Atlantis myths to find such a place. "Fortean" as it may sound, many of our core modern scientific and technological achievements are, according to Russo, a rediscovery of what had already been known to the Alexandrian ancients of 300 BC, but subsequently forgotten. If this mystery piques your imagination, by all means read this book. It is well written, copiously referenced, and includes an extensive and illuminating discussion of what "science" is, essential to understanding what, exactly, was lost. We are used to taking the progress of scientific knowledge for granted, but perhaps we should not be complacent --- if science was forgotten once, could it be lost again? There is much food for thought here.

To many leading historians (at least, of the past whose books and work I have begun to touch upon) I would imagine they would also give this book 2 stars as well. From a history of science and a history of philosophy perspective, the work lacks deep professional self-awareness and understanding. (a standard scientific method does not exist except at the most superficial level and what is a completely unrespected form; nevertheless author writes as if such a standard scientific method exists in our day and age) More importantly, although the ancient Greeks have and are no doubt been and being underestimated, personfying them with the awareness of professional 20th century philosophy of science is just as bone-headed as claiming the Ancient Greeks to be more simple than they were. Whatever the awareness and intellectual powers of these people were, they still seem to be slightly more advanced than all of modern thought in some ways. Although they are approachable (e.g. Rollo May's Love and Will reconstructs parts of Ancient Greek thought), this book is pretty far from the mark. Alas, emberassingly so.