The decline and collapse of human societies is nowadays a popular subject. The environmental questions, the resource shortage, the nuclear menace, the demographic explosion, and other “apocalyptic” dangers taught us that our civilization might have a limited life.
From Gibbon to Tainter and, more recently, to Jarred Diamond the decline and collapse of societies like Roman or Maya empires were primarily studied. Nobody ever mentioned a similar breakdown of the Hellenistic cultures. However, Lucio Russo discovered a different kind of collapse, almost invisible and maybe even more important: a scientific fall down.
Russo's main idea is that a scientific revolution took place during Hellenistic times, and it was forgotten while science, as a systematic inquiry, has been abandoned in Antiquity.
The recovery of science has been accomplished only 17 centuries later.
Russo’s contributions cover in detail the birth, the place, the decline and fall of Hellenistic science and technology in the domains like mathematics, mechanics of solids and fluids, topography and geodesy, optics, astronomy, anatomy. He obtained impressive results, among which the inverse square law of gravitation was discovered by some Hellenistic authors. Such statements might be challenged. This is not the point here since we would like to inquire about Russo’s supporting hypothesis and researching methodology. Only the results of this inquiry might offer materials for deep reflections or futures studies[5].
1. The timing of the first scientific revolution and the Hellenism
It is now generally accepted that the Hellenistic age started in 323 B.C., with the death of Alexander the Great and finished by 30 BC with the death of Cleopatra and the annexation of Egypt by Rome.
Russo agrees with the starting point of the Hellenistic times. For him, the end of that age was linked to the end of a scientific revolution. And it happened from the second century B.C. when scientific studies declined rapidly.
For Russo, the most severe adverse effect on the scientific activity lay in the longs wars between Rome and the Hellenistic states, from Syracuse's plunder and the death of Archimedes in 212 B.C to 146 B.C. when Carthage and Corinth were razed to the ground. Russo considers that the Roman world from the third and second centuries B.C. was much more brutal than Virgil and Horace's world. As a matter of fact, the refined culture later acquired by Roman intellectuals was the result of continuing contact with the Hellenistic civilization, mainly through Greeks taken as slaves and by the plundering of Greek works of art.
According to him, “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. For example, Polybius acknowledged that the Greek population of Alexandria was almost entirely destroyed at that time”.
2. Arguments for a scientific discontinuity followed by an unstoppable decline
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".
The interruption of the oral transmission made ancient works incomprehensible. For example, Russo mentions Epictetus's case, regarded, at the beginning of the second century A.D. as the “greatest luminary of Stoicism.” Epictetus confessed to being unable to understand Chrysippus, his Hellenistic predecessor.
Russo also challenges the common opinion that the Almagest rendered earlier astronomical treaties obsolete. To him, such a vision is incompatible with the overlooked reality that “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, in that period, a profound cultural discontinuity. This break, attested in different ways, is clearly illustrated, especially by the astronomical observations mentioned in the Almagest. “They are spread over 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 made by Agrippa”.
The author mentions the relationship between the Almagest's star catalog and the star coordinates of Hipparchus, citing the works of Grasshoff, according to whom, although Ptolemy included some coordinates measured by himself, he also widely used the Hipparchian data from three centuries before.
3. A partial recovery based on reproduction and selection of some scientific results (drawback: the simplest and not the best results have been preserved)
Hellenistic culture ‘survived’ during the Imperial Roman age. The former Hellenistic kingdoms were not assimilated linguistically or culturally, and from a technological or economic point of view, there was absolute continuity with the preceding period.
After the interruption produced by the wars with Rome, the ‘Pax Romana’ allowed partial recovery of scientific research during the first and second centuries A.D. (in the time of Heron, Ptolemy, and Galen).
However, after that moment, the decline was inexorable. 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 been usually underestimated in the past due to the assumption that it was the best material that survived. Russo considers the optimistic view that ‘classical civilization’ handed over specific major works that included the lost writings' knowledge as groundless. 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”.
According to Russo, even among real scientific works preserved by Byzantines and Arabs, two selection criteria seem to have been in use. “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 chapters. 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”.
Is this vision of Russo confirmed by other research? We might say yes since there are similar discontinuities and decays in technologies closely related to scientific activities.
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”.
Price also stated 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 automata 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. In the first century B.C., those facts made possible the building of 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”.
4. The ‘fossilization of knowledge’ as a mean for reconstructing ancient scientific achievements
Russo considers that Latin or Greek authors of the imperial period are citing the Hellenistic authors without understanding the ancient scientific methodology. The science became ‘fossilized’, crystallized, a dead fragment from an ancient living organism.
Is this vision of a ‘fossilized science’ consistent? We might think, yes. One can give just an example of such a ‘fossilized astronomical knowledge’ transmitted using oral communication.
In this respect, Neugebauer cites the book Kâla Sankalita published in Madras in 1825 by Warren. Warren had traveled extensively in Southern India and recorded the Tamil natives' astronomical teachings for the lunar motion computation. “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 to determine the magnitude, duration, beginning, and end of an eclipse with numbers that run into the billions in their integral part and with several hexadecimal places for their fractions. Simultaneously, they used memorized tables for the sun and moon's daily motion involving many thousands of numbers”.
For Neugebauer, it 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…”.
This kind of Hellenistic ‘fossilized knowledge‘ is, for Russo, the starting point for the recovery of science in the XVIth century. And the ‘fossilized science‘ is also the ground on which he realized a spectacular and highly controversial reconstruction of some scientific Hellenistic theories. To accomplish it, Russo opens a methodological novelty in the interpretation of the original sources. He focuses on the second-hand information (‘fossilized knowledge’) spread throughout the literary sources, not just scientific references. This close examination of more resources than the traditional ones allows him to deepen the historical perspective and makes possible his spectacular discoveries.
5. Conclusions and implications
A. The actuality of Russo’s study
Such research seems, at first, without practical significance. However, the final interrogation of Russo concerns us all.
The author asks if the decrease of a general and unified scientific theory to some fragmented and ‘fossilized knowledge’ unable to produce new results may occur in the coming future or is just a matter of the ancient past. His answer to the question is definitely affirmative. Russo thinks that the vital substance of knowledge is now reserved for smaller and smaller groups of specialists, which may endanger science's future survival. Knowing what produced ancient decay may allow us to avoid the same fate in the future.
B. The testing of some primary hypotheses
In our description of Russo’s results, we have seen that his theory and conclusions were agreed upon by other savants. In this way, one can accept that such phenomena were possible without knowing anything about their probability.
However, some of Russo’s hypotheses may be tested. We might verify, for example, if the transmission of scientific knowledge from the more advanced society (Hellenistic) versus, the less advanced one (Rome) was, in fact, based on reproducing the most accessible and not the most advanced works. Therefore one can imagine an actual sociological test, finely tuned to meet the real conditions from Hellenistic and Roman times.
C. The opening up of other research (some questions and tentative answers)
We may underline several other issues raised by the Russo’s constructions such as:
-How can one measure an ancient society's scientific and technological creativity, lacking today's patent systems?
-What made the Greek Hellenistic world the first (and the last) scientifically developed culture before the modern one? Is it linked to the plurality of science centers in the competing Hellenistic kingdoms? What other issues were still relevant?
-Why this advanced Hellenistic culture was so fragile? Is it because of the reduced number of Scientific, the lack of printing facilities, the spreading of illiterate, the inexistence of institutions like modern scientific academies?
-What kind of sociology of science characterized the Hellenistic time? What makes the transfer of ancient scientific knowledge different from the transmission of old technology?
-Has Hellenistic science played an inevitable role in the emergence of modern science? Could the developments of science have followed a different pathway?
-Finally, what role has played this 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, was the path to the ‘Decline and Fall of the Empire’ unavoidable? Was the disappearance of the scientific method the mortal illness of the Roman Empire? Anyway, we may assume that a society without real technological and scientific creativity has a very dark future.
All these questions open up a new domain for future research. This sort of inquiry makes the history of science and technology on Russo's pathway such a captivating subject.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88).
Lucio Russo, an Italian physicist, mathematician, and historian of science, is a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He reconstructed some contributions of the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus ([1]"The Astronomy of Hipparchus and his Time: a Study Based on Pre-Ptolemaic Sources," Vistas in Astronomy, 1994, Vol. 38, p. 207-248), reconstructed the proof of heliocentric attributed by Plutarch to Seleucus of Seleucia ([2]The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had To Be Reborn, Berlin, Springer, 2004, ISBN 978-3-540-20396-4) and studied later the history of theories of tides, from the Hellenistic to modern age ([3] Flussi e riflussi: indagine sull'origine di una teoria scientifica, Feltrinelli, 2003).
Seneca: “Quaestiones naturals.”, VII, xxix, 4.apud THE ANCIENT ENGINEERS by L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP, The MIT Press Paperback Edition, March 1970.
Derek de Solla Price, Science since Babylon, Enlarged Edition, New Haven and London Yale University Press, Third printing, 1978. pp44.
O. NEUGEBAUER Chapter VI, “Origin and Transmission of Hellenistic Science,” pp 165 in THE EXACT SCIENCES IN ANTIQUITY Second Edition, DOVER PUBLICATIONS.
