A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



which difference of opinion might easily prevail; but 

 there can be no question that, for one reason or another, 

 the Alexandrian school as a creative centre went into 

 a rapid decline at about the time of the Roman rise to 

 world-power. There are some distinguished names, 

 but, as a general rule, the spirit of the times is remi- 

 niscent rather than creative ; the workers tend to collate 

 the researches of their predecessors rather than to make 

 new and original researches for themselves. Eratos- 

 thenes, the inventive world-measurer, was succeeded 

 by Strabo, the industrious collator of facts; Aristar- 

 chus and Hipparchus, the originators of new astronom- 

 ical methods, were succeeded by Ptolemy, the perfecter 

 of their methods and the systematizer of their knowl- 

 edge. Meanwhile, in the West, Rome never became a 

 true culture-centre. The great genius of the Roman 

 was political ; the Augustan Age produced a few great 

 historians and poets, but not a single great philosopher 

 or creative devotee of science. Cicero, Lucian, Seneca, 

 Marcus Aurelius, give us at best a reflection of Greek 

 philosophy. Pliny, the one world-famous name in the 

 scientific annals of Rome, can lay claim to no higher 

 credit than that of a marvellously industrious collector 

 of facts the compiler of an encyclopedia which con- 

 tains not one creative touch. 



All in all, then, this epoch of Roman domination is 

 one that need detain the historian of science but a 

 brief moment. With the culmination of Greek effort 

 in the so-called Hellenistic period we have seen an- 

 cient science at its climax. The Roman period is but 

 a time of transition, marking, as it were, a plateau on 

 the slope between those earlier heights and the deep, 



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