91av

Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era by Georgia Irby-Massie and Paul Keyser,
Routledge, £17.99, ISBN 041523848X

CUTTING up the bodies of “wicked men” awaiting execution while they’re still
alive isn’t something most would associate with Greek science. More familiar are
the endlessly retold stories, such as Archimedes shouting “heureka!” as he leapt
from the bath. But for the real stuff, try Georgia Irby-Massie and Paul Keyser’s
refreshing counterweight to those often fictional retellings.

Aimed at historians of science—and classicists with broad
horizons—Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era covers an extraordinarly
rich period of discovery and exploration. Macedonia’s Alexander the Great
forcibly welded together thousands of poleis (loosely translated as city
states) into an empire. After his death, no single ruler controlled this vast
territory, but powerful kingdoms sprang up. People used Greek as a lingua
franca, and a rich exchange of ideas in art and science began under the
patronage of these kings and aristocrats.

There are some wonderful translated documents here, covering subjects from
maths and medicine to mechanics. You can even follow Heron of Alexandria’s
instructions on how to build a robotic travelling theatre: with the aid of
pulleys, weights and non-stretch rope, Dionysus’s altar bursts into flames while
drums and cymbals sounded. Or travel from Massalia (Marseilles) to Britain,
Germany and the far north in the company of Pytheas*.

It’s tempting to judge these discoveries by how close they are to modern
science. That the world’s a globe, not flat, or how to work out longitude and
latitude, involves a familiar mixture of theory, models and observation, so
these ideas seem “right” to us. It’s salutary to realise that astrology, a new
combination of Babylonian and Greek data, got its head start in ancient
Greece.

Vivisection on humans? Just last summer, the government of China was denying
testimony that it “harvested” organs from condemned prisoners while they were
still alive.

*Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe’s The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas
the Greek (Penguin, 2001) completes Pytheas’s extraordinary journey from the
scattered fragments written about his travels