time: the refreshing river 



in the Oeconomicus held the industries in poor repute. "Men engaged 

 in the mechanical arts," he says, "must ever be both bad friends and 

 feeble defenders of their country." He troubled himself little with 

 those skilful in carpentry, metallurgy, painting, and sculpture, but was 

 always anxious to meet a "gentleman" (o KaXos KayaOog). The 

 results of this were inevitable. Classical surgery and obstetrics benefited 

 practically nothing from the speculations of the biologists from Alc- 

 maeon to Herophilus. Surgeons and midwives remained members of 

 the painter-cobbler-builder group, the group of base-bom mechanics, 

 entirely distinct from the astronomer-mathematician-metaphysician- 

 biologist group, the group familiar with courts and tyrants.^ 



Only the greatest broke away from this tradition: Aristotle, when 

 he conversed with fishermen; Archimedes perhaps, when he con- 

 structed his mechanical devices. For the rest, it was too strong. 

 Down to the end of the Roman period the artillery in use remained 

 precisely what it had been six hundred years before, although the 

 empire was crumbling under barbarian pressure, and would have 

 given anything, one would imagine, for an improved artillery capable 

 of withstanding the Gothic armies. It is strange, as has been acutely 

 said, that the Romans never invented anything so much in the Roman 

 taste as a railway. So far as Hellenistic empirical industrial chemistry 

 was concerned, the Democritean and Epicurean atoms might never 

 have existed. And in medicine, the only effect of the brilliant Greek 

 atomic speculations was to give rise to the Methodic school of Roman 

 physicians, described by Allbutt,^ the influence of which was never 

 strong, and contributed relatively little to the main stream of thera- 

 peutics originating with Hippocrates. 



In sum, we cannot dissociate scientific advances from the technical 

 needs and processes of the time, and the economic structure in which 

 all are embedded. We shall never understand the failure of Greek 

 science if we consider it in abstraction from the environment which 

 sterilised its speculation. The history of science is not a mere succession 

 of inexplicable geniuses, direct Promethean ambassadors to man 

 from heaven. Whether a given fact would have got itself discovered 

 by some other person than the historical discoverer had he not lived 



^ In the Renaissance period Vesalius himself realised this: see B. Farrington, 

 •'Vesalius on the Ruin of Ancient Medicine," Modern Quarterly, 1938, 1, 23. The 

 question is also well discussed by J. G. Crowther in The Social Relations of Science 

 (London, 1941), p. 378. 



^ Greek Medicine in Rome (London, 1921). 



144 



