Emma Gee
Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension. C.P. Snow
Snow’s opposition between literature and science may seem more naive to us than to his audience of 1959; to the Greeks and Romans it would have been incomprehensible. The concept of antipathy between representatives of the two poles, as it operates today, was unavailable to ancient thinkers. There was, in antiquity, no one word equivalent to “science.” Areas which we might call “scientific” were covered by a range of terms, often more different from one another in nuance than in meaning. These terms include sophia (wisdom) and philosophia; logos (reason, often opposed to muthos); techne (art, skill), and episteme (knowledge or understanding).
One can see immediately from Plato (often the source of such definitions in modern literature) the slipperiness of some of these terms in their original context. Consider, for instance, the discussion of techne and episteme at Plato, Gorgias 449–52. Techne, which is said by Rihll (1999: 2) to be the Greek term usually translated as “science,” cannot be limited in this ancient text either to scientific practice as opposed to theory, or even to the sciences per se. At Gorgias 449c9 the orator Gorgias is described by Socrates as rhetorikes … epistemon technes, “being skilled (epistemon) in the science of rhetoric.” Here epistemon denotes theoretical knowledge, techne the thing practiced (here rhetoric). But the noun episteme can also be used of practical knowledge, as it is shortly afterwards, at 449d9–10, episteme peri logous, “the science of speaking.” Moreover, in another Platonic dialogue, Phaedrus 260d, techne is used as episteme was in the Gorgias, to mean “the science of speaking,” ten ton logon technen. Thus there is no straightforward theoretical/practical antithesis between episteme and techne. Not only that, but Plato’s Socrates casts the net very wide in terms of the activities covered by techne.AtGorgias 452a1–d5, the doctor, fitness trainer, and entrepreneur could all say the same – techne refers to all of their activities.1
Similar problems exist in connection with the other terms used to describe ancient science. For instance, as Geoffrey Lloyd has shown (1987: 83–102), sophia could often refer to poets and poetry. Sophia cannot be confined to science, but is an area in which knowledge of the natural world competes with knowledge expressed in poetry, the first referent of the term. Nor are philosophia and its cognate verb, philosophein, confined to areas of activity we recognize as science, although they may include the natural sciences (Lloyd 1987: 94 n153). Logos, too: sometimes logos could mean “science” or “reason”;2 at other times, its distinction from muthos could be blurred.3 We need not even expect a one-word designation for “science”: Socrates, for instance, calls his youthful devotion to “natural science” an enthusiasm for “that [sort of] wisdom which they call ‘the investigation of nature,’” tautes tes sophias hen de kalousi peri phuseos historian (Phaedo 96a7–8). Kahn (1991: 2) uses peri phuseos historia, unreferenced, as if that were the standard Greek designation for “science.” However, in the context in which it appears, Plato’s Socrates describes his disillusionment with that type of wisdom because the material causes it offers are insufficient to explain the underlying principles of the cosmos.
Moving from terminology to concepts and practices, the idea of a scientific “revolution” was not defined before the twentieth century. There was no thoroughgoing scientific “revolution” in antiquity and no way of thinking about technological progress in these terms. True, war machines, aqueducts, and concrete represent substantial innovations (and – in the case of the latter two at least – improvements in quality of life); but something as fundamental as accurate time-keeping devices had to wait until much later. The Greeks, in particular, appear not to have made the fullest use of technologies available to them: instruments such as the Antikythera mechanism, the earliest sophisticated scientific calculator known (150–100 BC?), while possible in terms of manufacture, seem to have been the exception rather than the rule.4 Accuracy in measurement was possible but often subordinated to metaphysics, perhaps (in part) under the influence of a Platonic mistrust of sense-perception.5 Even the “big ideas” of ancient science, such as calculation of the size of the Earth, or the estimation of the extent of the universe, arguably had little impact, in that scientific activity and readership were confined to a tiny elite.6
It is debated how far ancient science can be differentiated from what went before. Most scholars would agree that, while “science” and “literature” are grown together at the roots, there is at the same time no small degree of discontinuity between them, even initially.7 I want to begin by focusing on some of the evidence adduced in support of a head-to-head battle between “literature” and “science” in the fifth century BC. Secondly, I shall call on another fifth-century text, Aristophanes’ Clouds, to demonstrate how the “science”– “literature” debate could be theorized by one ancient author. Finally, I shall look at Roman permutations of the “literature”–“science” dichotomy, and show how the latter was effectively assimilated to the former to form a literary-scientific vision of Roman space. This chapter will range selectively from the fifth century BC to the first century AD, using examples to construct an argument both for the complexity of the relationship between “literature” and “science” in antiquity, and for the increasing interconnectedness of the two polarities, resulting in a process of give and take rather than an antithesis.
What was the state of play between “literature” and “science” in the fifth century BC, the formative period of Greek “science”? Many would like to see a clean break. Glen Most states, “The quarrel of the early Greek philosophers with the traditional poets begins with Xenophanes, who asserts that ‘both Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all things that are blameworthy and a reproach among men: stealing, committing adultery, and deceiving one another’” (Most 1999: 337).8 Using this fragment to show a break between early Greek poetry and philosophy, Most asserts that in Xenophanes’ successor Heraclitus “this quarrel” (between poetry and philosophy) “reaches its bitterest extreme” (338), referring to Heraclitus’ dictum, “Learning of many things does not teach intelligence: if so it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus” (KRS 190). We cannot assume, however, that poetry is in the firing line; nor can we uncritically align the exchange between Heraclitus and Xenophanes with a later idea of an “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” On the first issue, Most is not alone in asserting that Xenophanes represents a break with tradition;9 but it is too easy a dichotomy to say that he marks a discontinuity between the new (pre-Socratic) “science” and the older poetry. The view that the Xenophanes fragment is part of a debate between philosophy and poetry cannot be sustained in the light of Heraclitus’ response. Xenophanes is not hammered for being a poet – although he was one, since his “cosmology” was in verse – nor is he grouped explicitly with other poets. Of those in Heraclitus’ line of fire, only Hesiod can prima facie be considered a “literary” figure: Pythagoras was a philosopher and mystic, Hecataeus, a contemporary of Xenophanes, a historian and geographer. If Heraclitus is “interpreting” Xenophanes’ statement, he is not doing so in the light of a science-versus-literature debate recognizable in our terms. Rather, he does it in a spirit of intellectual pugilism, whereby he takes issue with all those with some claim to inspired knowledge, and marks out a territory for himself. Heraclitus’ statement cannot, therefore, be read, in succession with Xenophanes’,asan effort to ditch poetry in favor of the new science.
Most assumes that poetry is the wrong medium for natural philosophy and had to be replaced, in the natural order of things, by prose: “One of the most grievous scandals of early Greek philosophy is the fact that, even after the invention of philosophical prose, some of the greatest thinkers returned to poetry as the medium in which to publicize their philosophical message” (Most 1999: 350). But while we might think of prose as a suitable medium for scientific discourse, there is no reason for this view to be ascribed to the ancients. The very persistence of that medium testifies to its value. Empedocles’ On Nature (fifth century BC) and Lucretius’ De rerum natura (first century BC) are in verse. We should not downgrade the serious contribution of these works – the four-element theory, atomism – on the grounds of their literary form.
Moreover, for the pre-Socratics there is no pre-existing dichotomy between poetry and prose as philosophical media. It might be argued that this dichotomy was never in operation in any straightforward form in antiquity. As Most himself acknowledges (Most 1999: 332–33), Aristotle is the first to articulate a polarity between “science” and “poetry”: “But Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their meter; so one should call the former a poet, the other a natural scientist” (Poetics 1447b17–20, trans. Halliwell 1995). Even in this famous passage the distinction between “science” and “literature” is not a distinction between verse and prose: note that the authors on each side of Aristotle’s divide both wrote in verse. Poetry per se, then, is not one of Aristotle’s criteria in marking a literature–science divide.10
Secondly, the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” is a Platonic phrase, taken from Republic 607b5–6. In context, it does not refer to a quarrel between poetry and natural philosophy; rather, it is the poets’ inability to justify their truth-claims in a rational manner that renders poetry a candidate for banishment from the ideal republic – if indeed we take it that poetry is to be banished at all.11 And we must remember that Plato’s Socrates can be equally trenchant in his criticisms of the material explanations offered by the natural scientists, as he is at Phaedo 96a5–99d4. Tempting as it may be to see it as such, what we are witnessing is not a debate in the early stages of Western thought between “literature” and “science.” The debate is not even necessarily between mythical and rational ways of looking at the world, but rather, between intellectuals arguing in favor of the truth-status of their own utterances. Nonetheless, it is possible to see such debate as representing in itself a substantially new development, and one still with us in the area of scientific discourse, where problems are put forward, tested, and argued about.12 In the process of debate, cosmologies do emerge, to be subsumed by other cosmologies, vindicated, built upon, or discarded.
Our first example has taken the form of a snapshot of the debate about tradition and authority among the pre-Socratic philosophers. Our next example shows how such debate could be theorized in fifth-century drama. As construed by Aristophanes in his comedy of 423 BC, the figure of Socrates is a composite of various pre-Socratics. Scholars with an interest in “science” have tended to approach the Clouds as if it can be used to make certain claims for fifth-century Greek thought about the natural world (see Althoff 2007). Used with caution, the play can act as a sort of index to topics which interested “scientists” in the fifth century BC: the “experiment” with the flea at 144–53 (a problem of spatial measurement in empirical science),13 speculation about the gnat’s humming at 154–68 (acoustic theory and zoology),14 and – of course – astronomy, as at 171–72, where Socrates is seen investigating “the moon’s paths and revolutions.” At 177–79 there is a reference to the demonstration of a geometrical proof, undercut by a joke about passive homosexuality (Althoff 2007: 109). The “scientific” instruments described in 200–17 presumably reflect to some extent a “real” fifth-century concern with measurement, although the joke is in Strepsiades’ grindingly utilitarian interpretation of them (as in line 203).15 The existence of the map of the world described in 206 can be corroborated by other evidence of a fifth-century interest in cartography.16
One result of this approach to the text is an appreciation of Aristophanes’ remarkable familiarity with the ideas of the pre-Socratics. This is especially evident in Strepsiades’ and Socrates’ question-and-answer session about the causes of thunder and lightning (374–407). The question under scrutiny is one which intrigued the pre-Socratics, and many of the ideas bandied around in Aristophanes’ text can be paralleled from Heraclitus, Anaximander, Parmenides, Empedocles, and the early atomists.17 Socrates’ use of analogies from everyday life (sometimes too everyday, as at 385–93) may reflect the pre-Socratic use of such analogies, as, for example, when Anaximander says that the sphere of flame around the air surrounding the earth is “like bark around a tree.”18
More fruitful, however, than the selective, often too straight-faced use of the play as evidence for fifth-century “science,” is to see how it characterizes Socrates. The Socrates whom Aristophanes paints as “scientist” is an uneasy conglomerate of rationalist views and poetically elevated language. When Socrates is introduced at 223, his first words can be taken as a parody of high poetic style: “Why do you summon me, O creature of a day?”19 This is in line with how he will be characterized later in the play as a fellow-devotee of the Clouds, along with seers, doctors, and poets. At 225 he describes himself in a ridiculously grandiose metaphorical way resonant of poetry: “I tread the air (aerobato) and scrutinize the sun.”20
Poetic language is married with “scientific” discourse. Socrates’ first extended speech, at 228–34, is a pastiche of “scientific” gobbledegook: “To make accurate discoveries about heavenly phenomena (ta meteora pragmata) I had to suspend my mind, to commingle my rarefied thought (noema) with its kindred air.”“Meteora pragmata” are fundamental to Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates (cf. 333, 360, 1284), as well as being a key area of pre-Socratic speculation (see, for instance, Anaximander, KRS 121). “Noema” (229) is a term favored by the early philosophers, notably Empedocles (KRS 394). Likewise, Socrates’“theory” about thought and air reflects the ideas of his contemporary, Diogenes of Apollonia, who held that perception is the movement of air within the body (see KRS 603; Dover 1968: nn. ad 230–33). Later, the idea of lightning as a result of the compression of wind (404–7) is probably Anaxagorean (KRS 130, 131).
We can see how this double portrait of Socrates as natural philosopher and poet reflects some of the characteristics of the pre-Socratics seen above: the cut-and-thrust of debate, the nuanced interaction of different media – prose, poetry – and the struggle for authority in the realm of sophia. We can also see how language is used as a battle-ground for different types of wisdom. In his opening speech, as well as elsewhere in the play, Socrates lays himself open to the charge of appropriating poetic discourse to lend greater authority to his “scientific” utterances. Moreover, Aristophanes is trying to win the space back for poetry, his type of discourse, as much as for Athenian values, when he refers to himself in Clouds 520 as sophos (and elsewhere to Socrates and others – possibly including Empedocles – dismissively as sophistes).21 The poet of Clouds wins out over the natural philosophers – verse and prose – whose ideas are held up for scrutiny in the play.
So far I have been engaged in cautious exploration of a divide between “literature” and “science” in fifth-century Greece. But there are also many areas where, instead, the intersection of the two might be demonstrated. Although it could be argued that discontinuity between the sciences and literature grew greater as the more “technical” or “specialized” sciences developed, especially in the Hellensitic period (after the death of Alexander, 323 BC),22 it is possible at the same time to see how, in certain ways, science and literature became more enmeshed. The work of Hellenistic intellectuals often embraced both spheres. Eratosthenes, for instance, not only measured the circumference of the earth accurately, but had literary interests which were more than just side projects or parerga.23
The fruitful interaction of science and literature is easiest to see in the genre of poetry we call didactic, thus designated because of its ostensible aim of teaching the reader (although this aim is often window-dressing for learned literary play). In the Hellenistic period, didactic poetry self-consciously took upon itself the task of converting abstruse technical matter into readable verse. The best example of this is the Phaenomena of Aratus, an astronomical poem which rendered into verse two treatises of Plato’s pupil Eudoxus.24 The didactic tradition flourished in Rome: in the first century BC, Cicero “translated” Aratus into Latin hexameters, forging in the process an unprecedented vocabulary of Roman star-names (see Gee 2001, 2007). Cicero’s translation of Aratus was followed by others, including a partial one by Virgil in Book 1 of his agricultural didactic poem, the Georgics;25 a more complete, even augmented, one by Germanicus, writing in the early years of the first century AD;26 and finally the verbose rendition of Avienus in the fourth century AD (Soubiran 1981).
Didactic poetry, while concerned with technical minutiae, also had the power to take on entire world-systems. In the first century BC, Lucretius composed his extraordinary poem the De rerum natura, on the physical and ethical system of the atomist philosopher Epicurus.27 The Lucretian style of didactic, although not Lucretius’ Epicurean substance, is most clearly taken up in another extraordinary poem, the Astronomica, written by Manilius in the first century AD (see, most recently, Volk 2009). In the Renaissance, didactic becomes a signature genre of humanistic activity; its long life continued at least into the seventeenth century.28 In the Renaissance, the arsenal of Classical “science” could be used, through the medium of didactic poetry, in the battles waged around the “new science” of the Copernican system (Gee 2008).
The presence of science in literature is not, however, confined to didactic, or even to poetry. Rome developed its own special genre of technical and encyclopaedic literature. This includes the agricultural works of Cato, Varro, and Columella.29 Agriculture was a particularly Roman concern, and none of these works is “purely” technical: all of them, even Cato, the earliest surviving Roman prose author (c.160 BC), espouse a conscious ideal of “Roman-ness” in style and substance. The “technical” genre also includes Vitruvius’ De Architectura, dedicated to the emperor Augustus (on Vitruvius, see McEwan 2003). Again, this is by no means only a technical treatise: its scientific ambit outlines the knowledge strictly necessary for architecture, mapping the Roman project onto the wider world, particularly in Book 9, which is concerned with the principles of astronomy. Roman building, therefore, took place against the canvas of the cosmos and atop the underpinning of Greek philosophy and science. Likewise, the geographical treatise of Pomponius Mela, writing c.43 AD, can be read against the background of Roman expansion, most notably the Emperor Claudius’ British expedition.30 The encyclopaedic treatise of Pliny the Elder, the Natural History, composed c.77–79 AD, is a fascinating compendium of scientific knowledge in all fields, including astronomical, meteorological, ethnographic, and geographical; arguably such a project was a product of the ability of Rome to view the wider world in catalog form, facilitated both by Hellenistic science and by imperial expansion.31 Pliny’s style is not as flamboyant as his predecessor Seneca’s, whose Quaestiones Naturales, written under Nero, are a model of Roman rhetorical style, as well as a Stoic account of natural phenomena.
Overall, technical literature in Rome ran the gamut of subjects and styles, from Cato to the military and veterinary works of Vegetius (fourth century AD), and is too rich an area to cover here.32 It could be in Greek as well as Latin: the medical treatises of Galen (second century AD), written in Greek, but in a Roman context, are a particular area of interest in present scholarship (see Hankinson 2007; Gill, Whitmarsh, and Wilkins 2009).
It is probably partly due to the prominence of technical writing from the earliest period of Roman literature that catalogs form a particular feature of Roman epic poetry. Thus, in Lucan’s Neronian epic on the Roman civil war, the De bello cilivi, we are presented with long catalogues in the first two books, 1.396–465 (ethnography), and 2.396–438 (geography). These function to orient the Roman reader in the wider world. Moreover, a scientific view of the world becomes characteristic of representations of the state in Roman literature. Cosmological order can represent the proper functioning of the Roman empire in accordance with the laws governing the universe; cosmological dissolution – anti-cosmogony – the disintegration of the state; the principles of the divinely governed cosmos could be invoked in contexts of Roman imperialism. I should like to end with an illustration of this phenomenon, which amounts in some sense to a collapse of the divide between “science” and “literature.”
The speech of Aeneas’ father, Anchises, in the underworld in Virgil, Aeneid 6 (lines 724–886) demonstrates the reconciliation of natural-philosophical thought with a Roman vision.33 Anchises begins by recounting the shape of the universe. This account is influenced by the Hellenistic philosophical school of Stoicism, which held the pantheistic view that the universe is shot through by the ordering principle of Mind, also called Spirit, god or Zeus:34 “First of all, Spirit nourishes from within the earth and the watery levels, the phosphorescent globe of the moon and the Titan star (the Sun); and Mind, spread throughout its limbs, animates the whole mass and mingles itself with the great body.” Anchises goes on (728–32) to assimilate the soul of the universe just described with the nature of the human soul. A differentiated afterlife is then constructed, with purifications according to the sins of each, and rewards for some (lines 735–51). The reader is then presented with a vision of proto-Roman souls arrayed on the transmigratory production line, ready to leave the underworld for their incarnate state as the Roman heroes of the future (756–86).
The speech’s slide from cosmology to eschatology is a mark of a certain type of “scientific” literature, bizarre to us but familiar in antiquity, which united a “scientific” vision of the world with mythic or poetic features. This scheme is found as early as Empedocles (see Sedley 1998: 2–8); Virgil probably owes his progression more immediately to the Myth of Er in Book 10 of Plato’s Republic, where a cosmological vision, the “Spindle of Necessity,” is united with an account of reincarnation.35 Virgil combines the idea of reincarnation with a vision of Roman history, as Cicero had also done in his Somnium Scipionis, one of Virgil’s key Roman models (see Hardie 1986: 66–83). In terms of diction, the speech has touches of the Epicurean poet Lucretius (see Austin 1977: ad Aeneid 6.724); its cosmology, however, shows the influence of Cicero’s Stoic contemporary, Posidonius.36
Philosophically, Virgil unites old schools (Empedocles, Pythagoreanism, Platonism) with newer, even conflicting, schools (Stoicism and Epicureanism), and combines Greek with Roman traditions. Yet, although it shares features with some of its Roman antecedents, the speech surpasses them all in the degree to which it is scientifically, historically, and eschatologically totalizing, as befits a vision of the new Roman age under Augustus. Virgil’s knowledge of philosophy in this passage gives the lie to the “scientific” part of Anchises’ famous disclaimer: “Others (I truly believe it) will hammer out more sensuously bronze figures that look as if they’re breathing, and carve living faces out of marble, plead cases better, mark out with a pointer the paths of the heaven and describe the risings of the stars: remember, Roman, it’s your place to rule peoples under your empire” (Aeneid 6.847–51). That Virgil felt it necessary, through the person of Anchises, to apologize for the scientific part of his endeavor, should not blind us to its actuality. It is up to each generation of readers to decide whether Virgil’s harnessing of science to a literary vision of empire, which set a pattern followed for many hundreds of years, represents the best use and culmination of scientific knowledge in antiquity.
EANS = Keyser and Irby-Massey (2008)
KE = Kidd and Edelstein (1972–99)
KRS = Kirk, Raven, and Schofield (1983)
NP = Cancik and Schneider (1996–2003)
1 “In the broadest terms … a techne is the capacity to produce the right results in a given sphere, based on a knowledge of the relevant principles” (Rowe 1986 ad Phdr. 260d3–9). On techne as “art,” see Halliwell 1998: 44–51.
2 Lloyd 1987: 4–6 seems to take it thus, referring to “logos-unacceptable” (6) answers given by myth.
3 The account of the universe in Plato’s Timaeus is famously called an eikos muthos (29d2), a “likely story.” On muthos and logos in Plato, see Morgan 2000: 271–89.
4 The Antikythera mechanism has undergone intensive study in recent years: see Marchant 2008 and Lehoux 2007; further bibliography at www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ bibliography, the website of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
5 “When there was sufficient motivation, the ancient Greeks could develop some quite sophisticated instruments, but in general the improvements made in measuring instruments were modest” (Lloyd 1987: 281).
6 See Lloyd 1987: 331. Perhaps this is less true in the Roman period: for example, Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis) sets human endeavor against the great size of the universe, marrying Hellenistic science with a Roman vision designed for a more “general” leadership. See introduction and notes in Powell 1990.
7 A good discussion is Lloyd 1970: 1–15. For the two ends of the debate, still in operation, see Kahn 1991, who in my view over-argues the case for discontinuity in an effort to make Greek science more “modern,” as opposed to Sedley 2007: 1–8, who demonstrates that similar approaches to cosmology were shared by the early Greek poets and the first “natural scientists.”
8 The fragment of Xenophanes is KRS 166 (references to the pre-Socratics in this article are numbered as in KRS).
9 For instance, Xenophanes is described as “an apostle of enlightenment” by Fränkel 1975: 325.
10 On the fundamental criterion of mimesis at work in this passage of Aristotle, see Halliwell 1998: 127–28.
11 In fact, Plato may not even be whole-hearted in his proposal to banish poetry, as Halliwell (forthcoming) shows. (Thanks are due to Stephen Halliwell for letting me see his chapter in manuscript.)
12 Lloyd 1987: 85–102 shows how an agonistic culture may have dictated to some extent the path of development in early Greek “science.” The Hippocratic writings are most distinctive in this regard. Although these works present a spectrum of different ideologies and approaches, there is in some of these texts a self-conscious rationalism, and an advocacy of observation as a tool for prediction.
13 Dover 1968: xl–xli and nn. ad lines 148–52; I recommend his note ad 150 as an instance of (possibly) unconscious mimicry of his comic subject matter. See also Althoff 2007: 105–6.
14 Dover 1968: ad 163 speaks of “the study of sound in the fifth century,” deflating the comic force of Aristophanes’ fart-joke; see also Althoff 2007: 106–7.
15 Dover 1968: ad 201; see also Althoff 2007: 110–13.
16 Althoff 2007: 111 n.30. The earliest map was supposedly that of Anaximander (also fifth century), on which see Fränkel 1975: 264–65.
17 See Dover 1968: nn. ad 374–407. Particularly interesting is Aristophanes’ provocative use of pre-Socratic buzzwords. One instance is “necessity” (anagke) at 376 and 405. For anagke as a key term in determining value of evidence/proof in early “science” (particularly medicine), see Lloyd 1987: 119–23.
18 KRS 121. See Most 1999: 351 on this and similar pre-Socratic analogies, which in his view reflect Homeric technique.
19 See Dover 1968 ad loc. for poetic parallels.
20 Aristophanes’ hyperbolic characterization must have hit home: Plato picks up on this verb in his answer to Aristophanes at Apology 19c2–6: “For you yourselves saw these things in Aristophanes’s comedy, a Socrates being carried about there, proclaiming he was treading on air (aerobatein) and uttering a vast deal of other nonsense.”
21 On the distinction between Socrates and the “Sophists,” later constructed by Plato, see Wallace 2007.
22 On Hellenistic “science,” cf. Lloyd 1973; Sharples 1996; Irby-Massey and Keyser 2002; Lang 2005.
23 Lloyd 1973: 4. His work on the circumference of the earth is one of the success stories of the exact sciences in antiquity (see also Lloyd 1987: 231–34); at the same time, he is credited with a work on the mythical origins of the constellations, the Catasterismoi (Turning-into-stars).
24 Kidd 1997: 14–18. The fragments of Eudoxus (Lasserre 1966) come to us largely through the commentary on Aratus’ text by the astronomer Hipparchus: this is indicative of serious readership of Aratus’ poem.
25 See the introduction and notes of Thomas 1988.
26 The English edition is Gain 1976; interpretative issues in Possanza 2004.
27 The literature on Lucretius, even in English, is too extensive to cite at length: one could start with Gale 1994; Sedley 1998; Volk 2002.
28 See Haskell 1998 on Renaissance astronomical didactic, Haskell 2003 on seventeenth-century didactic.
29 On the agricultural writers, see Pagan 2006; on the agricultural writers and the calendar, particularly Ovid’s calendar poem, the Fasti, see Gee 2000: 9–20.
30 See EANS, pp. 685–86, with bibliography there cited.
31 On Pliny, see French and Greenaway 1986; Beagon 1992.
32 On later technical literature, see Formisano 2001.
33 The bibliography on this passage is extensive; see, for example, Wright 1963–64; Clark 1979; Tarrant 1982; Hardie 1986: 66–83; Feeney 1986; Habinek 1989; Solmsen 1990; Goold 1992; Jönsson and Roos 1996; Braund 1997.
34 On Stoicism in general, see, for instance, Sharples 1996. On the Stoicism of the passage under consideration, see Austin 1977: nn. ad Aeneid 6.724–51.
35 On the Platonic passage, see Halliwell 1988: nn. ad 614c4–621c5. Halliwell is particularly helpful on the “serious” astronomical background to the metaphor of the spindle of Necessity, while remaining cautious about its over-literal interpretation: “It is important to understand that Plato is offering an image of a metaphysical order, not a strictly astronomical hypothesis” (n. ad 616d6–7).
36 For instance, compare to Aeneid 6.726–27 Posidonius fr.21 KE –“Stoics say that the universe is governed according to intelligence [‘mind’] and providence (kata noun kai pronoian), as Chrysippus says in Book V of On Providence, and Posidonius in Book III of On Gods, since intelligence pervades every part of it like soul in us.” On the fiery soul (Aeneid 6.730–32) compare fr.101: “Posidonius said that god is intelligent and fiery pneuma [‘spirit’ or ‘breath’](pneuma = Virgil’s spiritus) running through all being.”
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