Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome

148 Pages·2008·3.606 MB·English

by  Liba Taub

contents
A note on the spelling of Greek names
and terms viii
A note on references to ancient works ix
Abbreviations x
Acknowledgements xi
Foreword, by Mary Jo Nye xiii
chapter 1 Genres of scientific communication 1
chapter 2 Scientific poetry and the limits of myth 31
chapter 3 Scientific and mythic explanation in
dialogue 57
Epilogue 79
A Note about Ancient ‘Books’ 87
Notes 91
Bibliography 112
Index 131
a note on the spelling of Greek
names and terms
For the most part (but not always), I have adopted a “latinized”
spelling of Greek names and terms (for example, Eudoxus, rather
than Eudoxos; Callippus, rather than Kallippos), to conform
to general usage. Following The Chicago Manual of Style (15th
edition), I have normally transliterated the Greek upsilon (υ) as
‘u,’ but in some cases (for example, mythos) as ‘y.’ The Greek chi
(χ) is transliterated as ‘kh’ (as in skholai).
viii ||
a note on references to ancient
works
References here to Plato’s Timaeus and Plutarch’s dialogue On the
Face on the Moon cite “Stephanus pages.” This convention offers
readers a uniform system of reference, regardless of which edition
or translation they use, by providing in the margins of modern
editions the page references to the edition of Plutarch’s Moralia
published in 1572 and of Plato’s writings in 1578 by Henri Estienne
(c. 1528/31-1598). These editions were, for more than two centuries,
the standard. The name “Stephanus” comes from the latinized
form of “Estienne.” References to Strabo’s Geography indicate their
place in the 1620 edition of Isaac Casaubon.
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abbreviations
c. circa (as in circa 586 BCE).
Complete Works The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, 2
vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984, Bollingen Series 71.2.
DK Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (eds) Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker, 6th edn, 3 vols, Berlin:
Weidmann, 1952.
KRS Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M.
The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd edn,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
LCL Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann
and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
LSJ Liddell, H.G., Scott, R. and Jones, H.S.
A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edn, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1940 with a supplement,
1968.
x |
acknowledgements
It is a very pleasant duty to acknowledge those who have contributed
to the writing of this book. The essays presented here were given
as public lectures when I had the pleasure of being a Horning
Visiting Scholar at Oregon State University in April 2007. Prior
to that, I benefited from testing out my ideas on participants on a
number of occasions: a Pudding Seminar at Newnham College in
2002, a seminar on dialogue presented at the Karman Institute for
Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern in
2006, and workshops on ancient scientific texts held at Newnham
College in 2006 and University College Dublin in 2007. I am
grateful to the Part II students in the Department of History and
Philosophy of Science who, during the autumn of 2007, read
and discussed Plutarch’s dialogue with me. I especially thank the
audiences at my lectures in Corvallis for their helpful questions
and insights.
I thank the following individuals for reading portions of the
text, and offering useful suggestions and criticisms: Aude Doody,
Ian Du Quesnay, Nick Jardine, Philip Hardie, Geoffrey Lloyd,
Christine Salazar, David Sider, Laurence Totelin, Philip van der
Eijk and Frances Willmoth. David Konstan not only read my
text, offering helpful suggestions, but also generously shared his
own work with me prior to publication, as did David Sedley. In
addition to providing welcome suggestions for my text, Harry
Hine very kindly shared his own translation of Aetna. Others
deserve thanks for providing special help in various ways: Janet
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Dudley, Marina Frasca-Spada, Ruth Horry, Tamara Hug, Natalie
Kaoukji, Diana Lipton, Peter Lipton, Helen MacDonald, Joshua
Nall, Maria Louise Nava, Margaret Olszewski, Torben Rees, and
Jill Whitelock.
Numerous colleagues and friends provided encouragement
and enthusiasm, discussing my work with me at various points,
for which I am grateful. Without naming all of them, I should
particularly mention: Jochen Althoff, Sabine Föllinger, Andreas
Gräser, Gerd Graßhoff, Martin Kusch, Sachiko Kusukawa, Diana
Lipton, Glenn Most, Ineke Sluiter, Michael Sharp and Michael
Worton. A special note of thanks is due to Paul Cartledge for
reading page proofs. Niall Caldwell discussed and read this work at
several stages and—yet again—contributed in ways too numerous
to list here.
I warmly thank Mary Elizabeth Braun and Jo Alexander at
Oregon State University Press for all of their help. Finally, I thank
Mary Jo Nye and Robert Nye, Thomas Hart and Mary Jones
Horning Professors in the Humanities, for inviting me to give
these lectures, and the series editors, Mary Jo Nye and Paul Farber,
for all of their encouragement and helpful advice in producing
this volume.
I dedicate this work, with gratitude, to my teachers.
liba taub
xii | Acknowledgments
foreword
The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in
the Humanities at Oregon State University was established by
a bequest from Benjamin Horning (1890-1991) in memory of
his parents, Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning, who were
members of pioneering families of Benton County and Corvallis,
Oregon. Benjamin Horning was a 1914 alumnus of OSU who
completed a medical degree at Harvard University and a degree
in public health at the Johns Hopkins University. His professional
career included service in public health in Connecticut, as well as
a position as medical director for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
Dr. Horning wanted his bequest at Oregon State University to
expand education in the humanities and to build a bridge between
the arts and the sciences.
The first Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professors in
the Humanities, Mary Jo Nye and Robert A. Nye, were selected in
1994, with academic appointments in the Department of History,
chaired by Paul Farber. Since then, the endowment has supported an
annual lecture series, individual lectures, conferences, symposia, and
colloquia, as well as teaching, research, and program and collections
development. The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Visiting
Scholar in the Humanities program was inaugurated in 2006 when
Ken Alder, Professor of History and Milton H. Wilson Professor
in the Humanities at Northwestern University, spent a week’s
residence on campus and presented a lecture and colloquium,
while also meeting with faculty and students.
Each of the volumes in the OSU Press Horning Visiting Scholars
Publication Series, under the direction of the Press’s Acquisitions
Editor, Mary Elizabeth Braun, is the product of a series of three
public lectures given by a Horning Visiting Scholar during a
one-week residence on the OSU campus. This first volume of
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essays was written by Liba Taub, Director and Curator of the
Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Reader in History
and Philosophy of Science, and a Fellow of Newnham College
at the University of Cambridge. The original public lectures that
form the core of Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient
Greece and Rome were given during April 10-13, 2007.
Liba Taub’s research and scholarship focus on the history of
scientific instruments and the history of early science, particularly
ancient Greek and Roman astronomy, physics, and meteorology.
Her earlier publications include Ptolemy’s Universe: The Natural
Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy’s Astronomy
(1993) and Ancient Meteorology (2003). She is the editor, with
Frances Willmoth, of The Whipple Museum of the History of
Science: Instruments and Interpretations, to Celebrate the Sixtieth
Anniversary of R. S. Whipple’s Gift to the University of Cambridge
(2006) and, with Alexander Jones, of the volume Ancient Science,
which will appear in The Cambridge History of Science series of
eight volumes.
Aetna and the Moon elegantly and insightfully bridges the arts
and the sciences in its narrative and analysis of the different genres
of communication used in the ancient Graeco-Roman world
for writing about natural phenomena, including a poem about
the volcano Etna and a dialogue on the face of the moon. Liba
Taub gives a clear and compelling description of the fluid and
permeable boundaries between oral and written discourse in the
ancient world and the complementarity of logical explanations
of natural phenomena with mythological stories of the activities
of gods and goddesses. In her specific examination of the genres
of the poem and the dialogue, she convincingly shows how the
so-called “Greek miracle” of scientific thinking coexisted with
didactic and teleological explanations of the natural world that
had their origins in poetry and myth.
mary jo nye
xiv || PPPrrreeefffaaaccceee
chapter 1
Genres of Communicating Science
On March 23, 1989, at a press conference held at the University 
of Utah in Salt Lake City, two electrochemists, Stanley Pons and 
Martin Fleischmann, announced that they had achieved controlled 
nuclear fusion at room temperature with a “simple, table-top 
apparatus.” Their announcement immediately captured attention 
worldwide: it simultaneously challenged the conventionally held 
view of fusion, a process which was thought to require extremely 
high temperatures or pressures, and held the promise of solving 
the world’s energy problems. 
But a long scientific controversy ensued; Pons and Fleischmann 
were largely discredited, and the episode is studied now by scientists, 
historians, journalists, and others as an example of “bad science.” 
One immediate criticism directed against Pons and Fleischmann 
pointed to their style of communicating science: they had chosen 
a press conference, rather than a peer-reviewed scientific journal, 
to make their announcement. Over time, however, criticisms 
focused on the failure of reproducibility of the results they had 
claimed. In the end, the rejection of so-called cold fusion was a 
denunciation of both their scientific practice and content.1 
Their choice of medium to communicate the claims regarding 
cold fusion, and the questioning by the scientific community and 
others of a press conference as a suitable vehicle for announcing 
scientific results (without also offering a detailed, technical account 
in a professional scientific journal), point to an interesting aspect 
of science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries:  
a whole new range of media for communicating scientific ideas, 
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