Decline of Ancient Science

Decline of Ancient Science

An explanation for the decline of ancient science has been put forward by the historian of science Benjamin Farrington: The mercantile tradition, which led to Ionian science, also led to a slave economy. The owning of slaves was the road to wealth and power. Polycrates’s fortifications were built by slaves. Athens in the time of Pericles, Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. And the brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.

What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders – politely called “gentle-men” in some societies – who have the leisure to do science. Accordingly, almost no one did science. The Ionians were perfectly able to make machines of some elegance. But the availability of slaves undermined the economic motive for the development of technology. Thus the mercantile tradition contributed to the great Ionian awakening around 600 B.C., and, through slavery, may have been the cause of its decline some two centuries later. There are great ironies here.

Similar trends are apparent throughout the world. The high point in indigenous Chinese astronomy occurred around 1280, with the work of Kuo Shou-ching, who used an observational baseline of 1,500 years and improved both astronomical instruments and mathematical techniques for computation. It is generally thought that Chinese astronomy thereafter underwent a steep decline.

Science has been very slow to take root. Image © Elena

Nathan Sivin believes that the reason lies at least partly “in increasing rigidity of elite attitudes, so that the educated were less inclined to be curious about techniques and less willing to value science as an appropriate pursuit for a gentleman. The occupation of astronomer became a hereditary office, a practice inconsistent with the advance of the subject. Additionally, “the responsibility for the evolution of astronomy remained centered in the Imperial Court and was largely abandoned to foreign technicians”, chiefly the Jesuits, who had introduced Euclid and Copernicus to the astonished Chinese, but who, after the censorship of the latter’s book, had a vested interest in disguising and suppressing heliocentric cosmology.

Perhaps science was stillborn in Indian, Mayan and Aztec civilisations for the same reason it declined in Ionia, the pervasiveness of the slave economy. A major problem in the contemporary political Third World is that the educated classes tend to be the children of the wealthy, with a vested interest in the status quo, and are unaccustomed either to working with their hands or to challenging conventional wisdom.