X SCIENCE OF THE ROMAN PERIOD A History of Science: in Five Volumes. Volume I: The Beginnings of Science | ||
WE have seen that the third century B.C. was a time when Alexandrian science was at its height, but that the second century produced also in Hipparchus at least one investigator of the very first rank; though, to be sure, Hipparchus can be called an Alexandrian only by courtesy. In the ensuing generations the Greek capital at the mouth of the Nile continued to hold its place as the centre of scientific and philosophical thought. The kingdom of the Ptolemies still flourished with at least the outward appearances of its old-time glory, and a company of grammarians and commentators of no small merit could always be found in the service of the famous museum and library; but the whole aspect of world-history was rapidly changing. Greece, after her brief day of political supremacy, was sinking rapidily rapidly into desuetude, and the hard-headed Roman in the West was making himself master everywhere. While Hipparchus of Rhodes was in his prime, Corinth, the last stronghold of the main-land of Greece, had fallen before the prowess of the Roman, and the kingdom of the Ptolemies, though still nominally free, had begun to come within the sphere of Roman influence.
Just what share these political changes had in changing the aspect of Greek thought is a question regarding
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 ancient 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,
PLINY
(From an old print.)
[Description:
Drawing of bust of Pliny, in an oval.
]
X SCIENCE OF THE ROMAN PERIOD A History of Science: in Five Volumes. Volume I: The Beginnings of Science | ||