Ancient Science

Ancient Science

Anixamander said and argued that we are so helpless at birth, that if the first human infants had been put into the world on their own, they would immediately have died. From this Anaximander concluded that human beings arose from other animals with more self-reliant newborns: He proposed the spontaneous origin of life in mud, the first animals being fish covered with spines. Some descendants of these fishes eventually abandoned the water and moved to dry land, where they evolved into other animals by the transmutation of one form into another.

Anixamander believed in an infinite number of worlds, all inhabited, and all subject to cycles of dissolution and regeneration. “Nor”, as Saint Augustine ruefully complained, “did he, any more than Thales, attribute the cause of all this ceaseless activity to a divine mind”.

In the year 540 B.C. or thereabouts, on the island of Samos, there came to power a tyrant named Polycrates. He seems to have started as a caterer and then gone on to international piracy. Polycrates was a generous patron of the arts, sciences and engineering. But he oppressed his own people; he made war on his neighbours; he quite rightly feared invasion. So he surrounded his capital city with a massive wall, about six kilometers long, whose remains stand to this day. To carry water from a distant spring through the fortifications, he ordered a great tunnel built. A kilometer long, it pierces a mountain. Two cuttings were dug from either end which met almost perfectly in the middle. The project took about fifteen years to complete, a testament to the civil engineering of the day and an indication of the extraordinary practical capability of the Ionians. But there is another and more ominous side to the enterprise: it was built in part by slaves in chains, many captured by the pirate ships of Polycrates.

“Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things”. (Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine). Image: Zen Sparkly Texture Mosaic Large ©  Elena

This was the time of Theodorus, the master engineer of the age, credited among the Greeks with the invention of the key, the ruler, the carpenter’s square, the level, the lathe, bronze casting and central heating. Why are there no monuments to this man? Those who dreamed and speculated about the laws of Nature talked with the technologists and the engineers. They were often the same people. The theoretical and the practical were one.

About the same time, on the nearby island of Cos, Hippocrates was establishing his famous medical tradition, now barely remembered because of the Hippocratic oath. It was a practical and effective school of medicine, which Hippocrates insisted had to be based on the contemporary equivalent of physics and chemistry (and astrology, which was then widely regarded as a science. In a typical passage, Hippocrates writes: “One must also guard against the risings of the stars, especially of the Dog Star (Sirius), then of Archturus, and also of the setting of the Pleiades”). But it also had its theoretical side.