CHAPTER VII 

 THE ROMAN WORLD. THE DARK AGES 



Among them [the Greeks] Geometry was held in highest honor : 

 nothing was more glorious than Mathematics. But we have limited 

 the usefulness of this art to measuring and calculating. Cicero. 



The Romans were as arbitrary and loose in their ideas as the 

 Greeks, without possessing their invention, acuteness and spirit of 

 system. Whewell. 



The Romans, with their limited peasant horizon and their short- 

 sighted practical simplicity, cherished always for true science in their 

 inmost hearts that peculiar mixture of suspicion and contempt which 

 is so familiar today among the half educated. The arch dilettante 

 Cicero boasts, even, that his countrymen, thank God ! are not like 

 those Greeks, but confine the study of mathematics and that sort of 

 thing to the practically useful. Heiberg. 



THE ROMAN WORLD-EMPIRE. For several centuries, during 

 the decline of Greek learning both in Greece itself and in Alexan- 

 dria, two new and powerful States were developing ; one having its 

 centre at Carthage on the northern shore of Africa, almost opposite 

 Sicily, the other the Roman Empire on the western shore of 

 Italy in the valley of the Tiber. The latter, at first comparatively 

 insignificant, rapidly rose to a position of world-wide power, con- 

 quering in turn Carthage, Greece, and the East and eventually 

 extending over the greater part of the then known world, from 

 Britain on the north to the Cataracts of the Nile on the south, 

 from India in the east to the Pillars of Hercules in the west. 



THE ROMAN ATTITUDE TOWARDS SCIENCE. One of the most 

 striking facts in the history of science is the total lack of any 

 evidence of real interest in science or in scientific research among 

 the Roman people itself or any people under Roman sway. Alex- 

 andrian science, even, though previously flourishing, languished 

 and went steadily to its fall after the submission of that city to 

 the Romans in the first century B.C. The truth seems to be that 



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